Rebecca Gilsenan

By any measure, 2025 was a landmark year for Maurice Blackburn’s class actions practice. With more than $1 billion secured for group members, a run of major trial and settlement outcomes, and multiple recoveries ranking among the largest in Australian history, the year demonstrated not only the scale of the practice but its enduring commitment to public interest litigation and meaningful compensation for those we represent.

In a landmark decision handed down early April, the Brambles case has become Australia’s first shareholder class action to succeed at judgment, with the Federal Court finding in favour of the plaintiff. The outcome is a welcome correction to a run of decisions and settings that have, in recent years, made it harder for shareholders to enforce their rights in relation to market disclosure.  This case demonstrated that shareholder class actions remain a vital means of holding listed companies to account where disclosure failures cause investor harm.

In other developments expected to shape shareholder cases in the near future, the High Court granted special leave to appeal in the CBA shareholder case in February this year, taking the opportunity to provide what is expected to be an important clarification of the law on causation and loss in securities class actions. The ultimate decision of the Court is likely to have wide-reaching ramifications for how shareholder class actions are conducted. Following the Full Court’s earlier declaration that CBA breached its continuous disclosure obligations, we now welcome the opportunity to make the case that group members are entitled to recover the losses which the applicants say follow from that breach.

The settlement approvals of the first wave of GCO matters signalled the regime’s maturation, and cemented Victoria’s position as a very popular jurisdiction for class action filings. In the vast majority of cases, the courts affirmed the original GCO rates, which underscored both the stability of the framework and its value for transparency and, ultimately, better returns for group members. As more GCO matters progressed through approval hearings over the course of the year, the regime’s strong adoption reflected years of sustained advocacy and a genuine shift in access to justice for hundreds of thousands of Australians.

As we move through the first quarter of 2026, these developments set an important foundation for the next stage of the class actions landscape—one defined by a growing recognition of the essential role collective redress plays in Australia’s justice system.

Rebecca Gilsenan
National Head of Class Actions

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