Just after 2pm last Friday, Federal Court judge Wendy Abraham ruled a series of stories exposing the gross negligence of Dr Munjed Al Muderis, published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age were, in fact, true.
This was a significant result for the country’s biggest newspapers, but it was a case that should never have been brought to trial and the latest example of how a dozen money-driven defamation lawyers have made a cottage industry of extracting fees from rich clients, only to score a spectacular own goal.
Surgeon Munjed Al Muderis on the way to court in 2023.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Some are no better than tow-truck drivers sitting in wait on the edge of the freeway so they can be first at the crash scene. They generate much of their own business by scouring stories about clients with money and then approach them with the double whammy of a cash bonanza and the restoration of their tattered reputations.
One such litigator has made it their hallmark to fire off semi-literate correspondence to editors and reporters in the dead of night, perhaps to show off an after-hours work ethic or to justify the already outrageous fees.
This is not a media sob story. Defamation laws exist to protect the reputation of people unfairly maligned without just cause. But when they are weaponised to strangle public interest journalism, painstakingly researched and fact-checked over months and years, society pays the price.
As big tech and the AI freight-train further imperil the bottom line of media companies, the danger is that if left unchecked, these lawyers will bully newsrooms into backing down every time they make a threat.
The Herald and The Age have shown they will always defend public interest journalism, but other newsrooms will not take on these multimillion-dollar fights. The lawyers know this and extract settlement payouts using the threat of years of litigation that saps the energy of editors and journalists and their already tight newsroom budgets.
Al Muderis was the second major defamation action to fail in 2025, coming after war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith’s misguided appeal to the Federal Court. They followed Bruce Lehrmann’s disastrous loss to Network Ten in 2024.
As The Age’s Michael Bachelard points out, the result doesn’t matter to the lawyers – they trouser their fees and move on to the next case, while their disillusioned clients are left to peer into the abyss of bankruptcy.
Read the full article here
