Category: Commercial Disputes

If you or your business needs to recover a debt, there are several steps to follow.   1. Letter of demand Firstly, you need your legal representative to send a letter of demand to the debtor. This puts the debtor on notice that the debt is...

If your company trades with another company and imposes a restriction on what, who and where they conduct their business, you may be involved in “exclusive dealing” and “third line forcing” – which contravenes Australian Consumer...

Leading commercial and insolvency lawyer Mark Streeter says many companies are uncertain about whether their credit is secured since the introduction of the Personal Properties Security Register on 30 January 2012. He says many companies have failed to...

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has found a North Sydney Solicitor guilty of advising eight of his clients engage in activity which breached the Corporations Act. This significant case sends a warning to all business advisors....

Macquarie Bank's recorded phone calls used as evidence against them What would you do if faced with a call on a margin loan of $160,000 from Macquarie Bank and given three working days to pay it? Over the past 12 months this has became a common...

Solicitor resigns and fights against signed employment agreement In recent years the pros and cons of employment contracts have been hotly debated. When a solicitor in a country town resigned from his firm to work for another he was accused of being in...

Breach of employment contract turns into an expensive lesson for employee When you hire someone to do a job it is natural to expect the employee to do their job and to be loyal to their employer and not help a direct competitor. Failure to do this...

The situation – theft of intellectual property An Australian company had an extremely well developed website. Hundreds of hours had gone into its development in optimising design and content to inform and direct new business. A competitor was...

Can a strata Body Corporate recover all of the legal costs it incurs when chasing outstanding strata levies? It is quite common for civil legal action to leave successful plaintiffs out-of-pocket in respect to their legal expenses, even if they obtain...

An interesting article in The Sydney Morning Herald in October 2009 commented on the statistics from Dun & Bradstreet's trade payments analysis.  The article, Business pay up more quickly, said the analysis showed a fall in the payment terms for...