What’s better than getting an award of damages to compensate you for your loss?  Well, many things, but “preventing the loss from occurring in the first place” is pretty high up on the list.  It’s for that reason that an early decision which will often have to be made in litigation is whether to seek

For many people, the question, “who do I work for?” will not be a difficult question to answer.  However, the complexity of corporate groups will sometimes make this question very difficult indeed.  Organisations which are large enough to employ HR professionals are usually large enough to have complex structures, and it is important for HR

From time to time, we like to spread the word  of what we do beyond the corners of this website. The word has spread as far as this month’s edition of Australian Dairy Foods Magazine, which includes an article by Angus on the legal implications of monitoring employee communications (arising from a recent case in

When it comes to my favourite things, I never really could get into raindrops on roses, or whiskers on kittens.  Fiduciary duties and chicken schnitzels, however, are pretty high on my list.  So you can imagine my delight when I saw that these two of my favourite things had been brought together in a recent

This is a story about vicious cycles.  In the late 1990s, the CBDs of Australian cities were full of vicious cycles, propelled by vicious (or, at least, more than a little assertive) bicycle couriers.  Then, for a while, the vicious cycles seemed to disappear (perhaps because the rise of email made it easy to send

“Act in haste, repent at leisure” is a proverb which comes up so often in employment law that I have sometimes been tempted to get myself a tattoo of those words.  (If the tattoo was not to my liking, of course, the tattoo would then itself be a perfect example of the proverb).  A recent

A series of recent news reports about underpayments in franchised businesses should have caused prudent franchisors to consider whether their franchise operations contained adequate workplace compliance systems.  However, even imprudent franchisors would probably not have considered that they might face the risk of direct liability for the sins of their franchisees. That looks set to

Most of us have days when the boss gets on our nerves (not me, of course; my employers are (a) wonderful people and (b) very likely to be reading this). But if the boss gets on your wick and is hopelessly thick so you can’t take a trick, should you call them a dick? The

There are many different ways to measure the ubiquitous success of Uber, but perhaps the most telling is the extent to which the expression “Uber, but for” has become a cliché for describing start-up ideas (“Uber, but for parsley? Sure, I’d love to invest in that!”) Some of these ideas appear to be a little

It’s not often that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) gets a lot of coverage in the Australian media. However, the ECHR was front and centre this week after a decision rather luridly headlined (in the Sydney Morning Herald) as “Bosses can snoop on emails to girlfriend, European court finds”. The decision concerned a