Justice Lee tore into Maurice Blackburn for missing its deadline to hand the court a payment schedule for Qantas's $120m payout to 1,820 illegally sacked workers, only flagging it needed more time 8 days before the deadline. He refused the extension, calling it "a minute to midnight" and that “court orders are not like the traffic lights in Palermo… not there merely to be observed when convenient”: ABC News

⚖️ Disputes: Kyle Sandilands settled his radio dispute with Commonwealth Broadcasting Corporation, but minutes earlier his side had already filed two key affidavits with the Court. In Sandilands v CBC, Stewart J ruled those affidavits weren't protected by the usual Hearne v Street confidentiality obligation, so the broadcaster can now use them in a related, ongoing case brought by Sandilands' former co-host. Affidavits filed under standard court timetabling orders aren't treated as "compelled". A party always has the choice whether to file, and what to include. Filing late, or after a settlement's already been struck, doesn't change that outcome: Federal Court

⚖️ Insolvency/AML: Insolvency practitioners now need to worry about anti-money laundering compliance. Under Tranche 2 of the AML/CTF reforms, liquidators, administrators and receivers become "reporting entities" if they provide "designated services" — things like selling company property, transferring shares, or helping arrange debt or equity financing. AUSTRAC has confirmed this applies even to formal appointments, catching a lot of routine insolvency work. Practitioners were required to enrol with AUSTRAC by 29 July 2026, appoint a compliance officer, and put an AML programme in place: Clayton Utz

⚖️ Corporate: Minority investors take note: those hard-won protections in a shareholders' agreement can backfire. Rights to appoint directors, veto budgets or approve borrowings might look reasonable individually, but bundled together they can amount to deemed control, tripping change of control clauses buried in the company's other contracts — no share transfer required. The risk doesn't stop there either. When shares are later transferred under pre-emptive rights, or forced out of a defaulting shareholder, ownership can shift quickly and quietly push a minority holder over the control threshold — often with no time to sort out third-party consents first: HWLE

Pay secrecy has long been the norm in the Australian legal market — lawyers comparing notes over drinks, but nothing on the record. We’re curious how the profession feels about changing that.

Anthropic just admitted its AI models broke the rules during testing, escaping their "sealed off" environments and actually hacking into three real companies, using nothing fancier than weak passwords. Nobody noticed until Anthropic went back and checked 141,000 test logs. It's the second incident in a fortnight, after OpenAI's models did something similar to Hugging Face: Bloomberg

Inflation dropped to 3.8% in June, down from March's three-year high of 4.6% when the Iran conflict sent fuel prices spiralling. Sounds like good news, except the trimmed mean still sits at 3.6%, still above the RBA's 2 to 3% target: TDA

💰 Blackstone is snapping up HSBC's $36bn Australian home and personal loan portfolio, with Pepper Money stepping in to manage the assets. Morgan Stanley advised Blackstone, while Citi ran the sale for HSBC: The Australian

👙 Brett Blundy is coming full circle, scooping up Bras N Things, Bonds, Berlei and Sheridan from Gildan for $700m through BB FIT Investments. He sold Bras N Things to Hanesbrands for $500m back in 2018: AFR

📱 Morrison has locked in seven weeks' exclusivity to buy a 30%-plus stake in Optus, pitching super funds on "bringing Optus home" at roughly $2.25bn. Singapore's Singtel hired Goldman Sachs to run the sale: AFR