Australia: Contracts and Commercial Law

Manufactured home estates can offer an affordable pathway to home ownership, but they operate differently to a traditional property purchase. Understanding the unique ownership structure, ongoing site fees, and legal obligations is essential before committing to a purchase in a land-lease community.

If you are an in-house lawyer, your team might face ongoing pressure to cut legal spending. As explored in Part 1 of this series, your team can achieve this by re-aligning the focus of the legal function with core business objectives. Narrowing the focus to core activities doesn’t mean that the secondary, ‘peripheral’ legal activities of an in-house team simply fall away. Although peripheral to core business objectives, these activities are still needed for the business to function.

Every in-house team hears the same instruction: do more with less. The usual responses are to pull work back in-house and to push external firms on rates, and both run out of road quickly. The teams that escape the squeeze change the question. Instead of defending a budget, they show the executive how a small number of legal activities move the objectives the business already measures.

Experienced mediators reveal the critical factors that separate successful mediations from failed ones, from ensuring decision-makers attend to crafting strategic position papers. Learn how proper preparation, face-to-face engagement, and pre-agreed settlement terms can transform mediation from a procedural requirement into an effective dispute resolution tool.

From 1 October 2026, foreign vendors in transactions valued at $50 million or more must notify the Australian Taxation Office when providing non-indirect Australian real property interest declarations. These new requirements introduce strict notification deadlines, comprehensive reporting obligations, and significant penalties for non-compliance. How will these reforms impact transaction planning, risk allocation between parties, and completion mechanics for cross-border deals?

Victoria's planning reforms introduce a provision that could fundamentally alter how permit decisions are made by allowing councils to specify which policy considerations are relevant to particular applications. This change challenges the longstanding National Trust principle that has limited decision-makers to considering only matters relevant to the purpose of specific planning controls. How will this hybrid approach to relevance reshape the balance between purposive interpretation and codified policy con

A contractor agreement determines who pays when work goes wrong. Independent contractors carry their own commercial risk, unlike employees, so the agreement allocates that risk in detail. Liability commonly arises from breach of contract, intellectual property infringement, and breaches of confidentiality. Indemnities, liability caps and insurance requirements are the three tools that allocate it. Australian law puts limits on that allocation. Consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law apply automatically, and no contract can exclude them.

A service provider who has not assigned their intellectual property still owns it, regardless of what the invoice says. Under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), the creator owns copyright by default, and ownership moves only by written assignment. Paying a designer or developer does not transfer ownership on its own. That default gives service providers real leverage where a client refuses to pay. Retention and suspension clauses turn the default into a contractual right to withhold deliverables.

The need for Australian businesses to maintain records of trade mark searches and evidence that consumers would experience no confusion before adopting a brand have never been more important.