Commercial Disputes and International Arbitration

Laina has acted in a wide range of commercial disputes that have involved significant sums of money. Although not always the case, commercial disputes generally involve 2 or more parties whose commercial relationship, more often than not formalised by a contract, have soured. By their very nature, commercial disputes generally involve complex and sizeable claims for damages for breach of contract.

Laina has been involved in disputes:

• seeking to both enforce and resist claims on guarantees and indemnities;
• resisting claims for breaches of confidence, see for example Brand v Monks [2009] NSWSC 1454;
• in relation to retail tenancies at the Retail Tenancies Tribunal;
• involving misleading and deceptive conduct under both the Trade Practices Act (Cth) 1974 and the Australian Consumer Law; and
• involving minority shareholders and fraud on the minority where she was able to secure a 100% recovery for a client on both the full value of her client’s minority shareholding in a pay television network and a 100% recovery on her client’s legal costs.

She has successfully avoided the enforcement of a guarantee against her client by persuading a court with the help of a handwriting expert that the evidence before the court did not allow it to be satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the signature on the guarantee was that of her client. Recently she was successful in obtaining judgment against a guarantor in Filmlock Pty Ltd v Nissi Investments Pty Ltd (No 2) [2013] NSWSC 959.