Practical Guidance | KeyNews March 2023 Edition

New tool in our Insolvency & Restructuring module
Rolling 12-month and 4-year corporate and personal insolvency statistics

Charts showing insolvency trends, including the number of corporate insolvencies over a recent 12-month period compared with base-level numbers. For a different perspective, we also chart the number of insolvencies over 4 years, identifying key events driving those figures. There are equivalent charts for personal insolvencies. Charts will be regularly updated.

New tools in Personal Injury Vic, NSW and Qld
General damages awards tables

New and updated toolkit items detailing the general damages awarded in matters across the Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland jurisdictions respectively. Damages awards are tabulated alongside short descriptions of matter types as well as the injury suffered by each plaintiff. Injury scale values are provided for Queensland matters. These toolkits cover each jurisdiction’s District or County Court, Supreme Court and any matters heard on appeal. These toolkits will be updated quarterly to ensure that practitioners are able to reference recent matters.

New ‘board pack’ in Cybersecurity, Data Protection and Privacy for cyber incidents

Cyber attacks leading to data breaches are increasingly common. Effective communications are particularly critical to an organisation’s ability to manage the reputational consequences of a cyber security incident. To address the challenges faced by big businesses when a cyber incident occurs, our new ‘board pack’ will assist Australian corporate clients with determining the internal and external response strategy in the wake of a cyber event, as well as provide a practical action point checklist to complement this strategy.

To read the complete Practical Guidance update from the March edition of KeyNews, subscribe here.

New Infographic in our Competition module

This new infographic covers the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s three core recommendations on digital platform reform, resulting from its fifth report in its ongoing Digital Platforms Services Inquiry. This useful tool contains ‘key takeaways’, summarising the potential impact of these recommendations on business.

New Boilerplate clauses and Commercial clauses subtopics in our Business module

Two new subtopics providing detailed and extensive guidance on common boilerplate and commercial clauses used in business and commercial agreements, to help practitioners draft and review commercial contracts efficiently and effectively.

Subtopics include 26 new guidance notes and 27 new precedents in relation to fundamental clauses such as definitions and interpretation, assignment and novation, entire agreement, governing law and jurisdiction, confidentiality, dispute resolution, force majeure, reasonable endeavours, and indemnity clauses.

Each guidance note is accompanied by precedent boilerplate and commercial clauses containing multiple drafting options to reflect different market-standard approaches and comprehensive drafting notes to guide practitioners through the drafting and review process.

New tools and checklists in our Consumer module

A new toolkit summarising out civil and criminal penalties for all Australian Consumer Law contraventions, including those applying before and after recent legislative changes. Links to legislation are also included. A new toolkit setting out key ACL provisions and corresponding consumer protection provisions under the ASIC Act for financial products and services. New and updated resources on unfair contract terms (UCT), including a flowchart providing a quick and user-friendly one-page overview of the UCT regime, and new checklists on identifying when the UCT regime applies and when a contract term may be deemed unfair. The UCT topic has also been fully revised and updated to take account of legislative changes with new Guidance Notes on exclusions to the regime and consequences for breach.

New tool in the Intellectual Property module

A new toolkit, Australian Trade Mark Office decisions tracker, provides an outline of the decisions of the Australian Trade Marks Office including the parties, application number, relevant class, mark(s), dispute type and a brief summary of the reasons for the TMO’s decision in a handy, user-friendly spreadsheet.

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER CONTACT OUR EXPERTS