“They need to distil ‘black letter’ law principles and overlay them with the subjectivity of societal norms,” the pair said.

“More broadly, the pressure from clients to do more for less also means there is a need for litigators to adopt and harness the benefits of technology, to drive greater efficiency and deliver a higher quality product.”

Another area of the litigious landscape to watch will be securities class actions, they said, with Australian courts actively “seeking to identify new ways of managing the increasingly common occurrence of multiple class actions on the same or similar subject matter”.

“The Australian Law Reform Commission recently published a report calling for the centralisation of class actions in a single jurisdiction and introduction of certain mechanisms to prevent competing class actions. The litigation landscape for directors is also in a state of flux,” they said.

“We may soon see a new criminal jurisdiction division in the Federal Court of Australia for white-collar crime, and ASIC has been clear in its intention to increase the frequency of actions against directors and take a harder line in its approach to litigation generally.”

These matters present challenges for Australian litigators, Mr Morse and Ms Elder said, given that our legal marketplace hosts “a large number of exceptional” lawyers in this space, making it hard for practitioners and their firms to stand out from the pack.

“That will invariably involve navigating the many uncertainties of litigation in a way which not only protects the client’s business – but supports it,” they said.

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“This is particularly important given the increasing focus on a corporation’s social licence and the ever-challenging regulatory environment.”

This challenge is especially pressing, Mr Morse and Ms Elder continued, given that the major litigious trend in Australia right now is that such legal work is on the rise, albeit with said rise being dependent on one’s sector.

“For example, we have seen a noticeable increase in disputes in the financial services sector, which, as you would expect, has come off the back of the financial services royal commission and the current regulatory environment. We have also seen an increase in litigation by some state-based occupational health and safety regulators,” they said.

And looking globally, international trends that impact upon the Australian marketplace have “not materially changed” in recent years, they reflected.

“International corporates continue to view Australia – and a number of other countries in the Asia-Pacific region – as a favourable investment opportunity.

However, when the risks associated with such opportunities come to fruition, this can give rise to potential disputes,” the pair said.

“When that occurs, the challenge for Australian litigators is to help their clients navigate what is likely to be a foreign jurisdiction for them, by distilling the process and procedure in a way which they understand and can engage with.”