Re-enforcing previous work of the productivity commission and the Victorian Law Reform Commission, the extensively detailed submission also endorses contingency fee billing, “in order to ensure greater returns to victims of wrongs and greater clarity around legal costs”.

The firm’s submission calls for any reform proposals to be guided by an improvement in class member outcomes and the removal of obstacles continuing “to stand in the way of meritorious claims.”

In addition, the submission supports the introduction of bespoke licensing for litigation funders, and also says “there is a need to introduce new procedural mechanisms to address the orderly coordination of competing or overlapping class actions”, but stopped short of supporting the Australian Law Reform Commission’s proposal in this regard, calling it “over-broad.”

Maurice Blackburn’s national head of class actions Andrew Watson said the Australian Law Reform Commission’s review is well-positioned to consider reforms in a factual context that can make a good enforcement system even better as it may lower victim costs.

Citing a statistic that less than one-third of one percent of all ASX-listed companies are facing shareholder class action in any given year, he said Maurice Blackburn has “always been more concerned with what the actual facts tell us, and the facts are clear in demonstrating that the rate of class actions is low in Australia.”

Mr Watson said the facts don’t lie, noting “our system works well and has adequate controls and checks and balances in place.”

He suggested there are sensible options “to deliver even more support, certainty and clarity to victims of mass wrongs,” and pointed to a sample of 16 cases run by Maurice Blackburn, where “$169 million extra would have been returned to clients’ pockets had we been able to run those cases on a modest 25 per cent contingency fee arrangement.”

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Class action principal lawyer and the submission’s co-author Julian Schimmel said a higher incidence of class actions is found in jurisdictions with weaker disclosure laws. He said vested business interest groups are ignoring this fact in their calls for a watering down of continuous disclosure obligations.

There is “inherent danger in just accepting the empty rhetoric of powerful business interests rather than acting on the evidence – you can end up being lured into an illusory circumstance and making bad policy for issues that don’t exist,” he said.

Pointing out the general distrust now surrounding Australian banks due to the financial services royal commission, he said it is “hard to look at the litany of corporate misconduct issues coming out of the banking royal commission and conclude that the way to instill greater integrity in the market is to demand lower disclosure standards from corporate Australia,” Mr Schimmel said.

He said Maurice Blackburn supports much of what the ALRC has put forward, and welcomes “clarity on the ongoing complexities of competing class actions and issues relating to the taxation of settlement monies that we contend should be in the hands of victims of mass wrongs, not the Australian [Taxation] Office.”

The latest on the Australian Law Reform Commission’s review comes after senior lawyers recently offered up their perspectives on the current position of regulation for litigation funders in the class action market, and a special Lawyers Weekly in-depth feature discussing the litigation funding market and inquiry.