In a recent FT interview, Harvey co-founder Winston Weinberg said the billable hour isn't dying, just getting a makeover. If clients can do a task themselves with AI, they won't wear a $1,000/hr associate bill for it. His point is that when a client pays $100k on a matter, they're really paying for the partner's advice, not the army of juniors running up hours on research tasks. AI exposes that fiction, and firms will have to price accordingly. Fixed fees for commodity work like DD, high fees for partner advice: FT

⚖️ Corporate: Accountants helping vendors dress up a share sale need to watch their step. In Shakespeare Partners v Transonic Travel, the Victorian Court of Appeal confirmed that Shakespeare Partners, an accounting firm, was accessorially liable under s 18 of the ACL for misleading representations made by the vendor in a $2.8m share sale. Despite never making the representations itself, Shakespeare had prepared the underlying financial statements while knowing the client funds figures were unreliable and unverifiable, and had been deeply involved in the due diligence process.

⚖️ Privacy: The OAIC has updated its Australian Privacy Principles Guidelines on APP 3, and organisations should review their information collection practices now. The revised guidance expressly adopts the Bunnings finding that holding personal information even momentarily constitutes "collection", and extends that to facial recognition, data scraping, tracking pixels, AI chatbots and meeting transcripts. Organisations must justify each collection is reasonably necessary using a data minimisation approach, and collections must be "fair" by reference to evolving community standards: Clayton Utz

⚖️ Regulatory: ASIC is appealing a Federal Court decision dismissing its case against intelligence software provider Nuix Limited, following the Court's April 2026 judgment. ASIC's original proceedings, filed in September 2022, alleged breaches of continuous disclosure obligations, misleading or deceptive conduct about financial performance, and directors' duties failures. The regulator isn't pursuing the directors on appeal: ASIC

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AI bonuses are getting out of hand. Samsung's 78,000 chip workers are pocketing an average US$340k bonus each after the company dropped US$26.6bn to head off a strike, with memory division workers potentially seeing closer to US$600k. For context, the average Samsung employee took home US$105k last year: Bloomberg

20,000 childcare educators are walking off the job on July 15 after the Albanese government dropped the ball in the budget, leaving no funding to continue a 15% pay rise past November. Without the $3.6bn needed to keep it going, workers face cuts of up to 15% to their pay: AFR

🔔 Gilbert + Tobin has landed back-to-back ASX mandates, advising SkinKandy on its $160m IPO after acting for Koala earlier this year. Australia and New Zealand's biggest piercing chain listed yesterday, priced at $2.20 per share, valuing the business at $245m: Point Blank

✈️ Barings, Aware Super and Rest Super have cleared the final hurdle on their ~$1.5bn acquisition of Moorabbin Airport, with the ACCC waving through the deal after scrutinising it since April: AFR

🏥 Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners is closing in on a $2.5bn acquisition of aged-care operator Estia Health, with Barrenjoey and Gresham advising Bain Capital on the dual-track exit: The Australian