With more than 1,000 fee earners across 27 offices, top-tier firm Herbert Smith Freehills has one of the biggest dispute resolution teams in the world. The team is widely recognised for its strengths in all range of disputes, particularly exceptional in the areas of government and regulatory, intellectual property and class action. The firm often wins mandates on some of the largest, most complex and important dispute cases in Australia.
The firm has the highest number of star litigators in the market including Damian Grave, Juliana Warner, Jason Betts, Luke Hastings, Andrew Eastwood and Anna Sutherland. Grave is singled out for his expertise in commercial and class action disputes. Both Betts and Hastings are recognised specialists in class actions and regulatory issues. Sue Gilchrist is a key individual for IP litigation.
The firm is currently representing Uber, BHP and Lendlease on significant class action proceedings. The BHP class action has the potential to become the largest shareholder action in Australian history. The firm has also represented both Worley and Iluka Resources in the only two shareholder class actions where the defendant has prevailed on liability.
In another notable matter, the firm acted for ASX in relation to all aspects of its response to the outage in its ASX Trade platform on November 16, 2020. The firm provided strategic advice in relation to the legal consequences flowing from the outage, including in assisting ASX with its response to an independent expert report from IBM into the outage and the imposition by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) of new licence conditions as a result of the conclusions that it reached. This high-profile matter has received significant media interest and regulatory scrutiny. It also represented the first high-profile action of the new ASIC chair’s tenure.
The firm was triumphant for defending Citigroup in a landmark criminal cartel prosecution which was abandoned by the Australian Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions more than three years after charges were laid in June 2018.
The firm’s recent client roster includes AMP, Coles, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Iluka Resources, Motorola Solutions and National Australia Bank.
The firm promoted Aoife Xuereb to partner in May 2022. In the same year, Michael Pryse and Grant Marjoribanks retired from partnership.