With the rapidly changing landscape and restrictions being imposed because of the coronavirus, we have been seeing an increase in queries about tenants being unable to pay their lease payments as their businesses are effectively placed into hibernation or as jobs are lost. The Prime Minister of Australia last night announced that, as part of […]

A creditor’s statutory demand is a mechanism created in the Corporations Act 2001 (“the Act”) for a creditor to serve notice on a company where they have reason to believe the company may be or is insolvent. To be insolvent simply means the company is unable to pay its debts as and when they aredue […]

There is no love lost between Donald Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen. Their dirty laundry has been aired very publicly indeed – and now so too are the legal costs of being involved in this sort of super heavyweight scrap. This article making front page news is a touch vague, but I have […]

We have probably all heard of (and some of us will have been impacted by) companies that are unable or unwilling to pay their debts and are placed into liquidation, often leaving creditors with little recourse other than to await the outcome of the liquidation and see if they will receive any or a partial […]

Earlier this week I was contacted by Duncan Hughes from the Australian Financial Review for comment on a topic that we are hearing a lot about in the media, namely “children accessing  the Bank of Mum & Dad” – the article published this morning is here. As lawyers we see this issue arising on a regular […]

Contesting a Will has a number of names: challenging a Will, estate litigation, making a claim under the Family Provision legislation or a Testators Family Maintenance Claim.  Some of these are the same, but within a Will challenge there are many possible types of challenge. The main type of challenge overwhelmingly is a Family Provision […]

2017 has been a very interesting year for defamation cases involving public figures. In June we saw Rebel Wilson succeed in a record breaking defamation case against a magazine publisher, Bauer Media, in Victoria over a series of articles that the Hollywood actress claim damaged her career by depicting her as a serial liar. In […]

This recent news article is a sad illustration of a person who as a Director of failed company says she was not aware of her duties as a director. Not only did she not know what her duties as a director were (and went on a massive spend up of company funds on her lifestyle) […]

An important but often overlooked consideration in estate planning are the tax implications that may arise. The decision of the Western Australian Court of Appeal in Caratti v Commissioner of State Revenue [2017] WASCA 128 delivered on 7 July 2017 makes it clear that if a Will is not worded correctly, then it can change […]

How is your business like a marriage? What happens when the business owners decide to part ways or if one business owner is forced to sell their portion of the business due to personal issues? Unfortunately, I see many business owners who have gone into business with a friend on a handshake deal and have […]