TMT: Media
Asia-Pacific Guide 2025 : Australia
Band 1
Email address
[email protected]Contact number
+61 2 9921 8888Chambers Review
MinterEllison maintains a leading defamation and pre-publication practice offering support to media companies on content and complaints matters. It also provides media broadcasting and cross-media ownership regulatory advice, as well as significant media-related transactional expertise. The practice offers comprehensive understanding of privacy, liability and risk management issues as they apply to online content in addition to freedom of information, privacy and breach of confidence complaints. MinterEllison is also noted for prominent transactional and infrastructure development work on behalf of telecommunications companies and for advising a broad range of clients from state and national government departments to major financial service players on transformative IT and telecoms procurement and outsourcing projects. It maintains a noteworthy track record of advising international clients on Australian and overseas technology mandates, and is further acknowledged for its work in the cybersecurity and data privacy space.
Work Highlights
- MinterEllison acted for Nine Entertainment in defamation proceedings brought by Ben Roberts-Smith in relation to three articles published by Fairfax Media mastheads in 2018 that implicated him in serious misconduct amounting to murder, war crimes and domestic violence.
- MinterEllison advised Cleanaway Waste Management on its company-wide digital transformation programme, which aimed to digitise and automate processes in the ‘call-to-cash’ customer journey, covering all of the steps from when a customer calls to when their invoices are paid.
Strengths
Provided by Chambers
"The team brought unique skills and experience. However, their greatest strength was to clearly understand the outcome we wanted and then support us in obtaining it with strong commercial advice."
"MinterEllison have a strong commercial and outcome focus. They also access the breadth of the firm, including their own tech consultancy, to deliver a seamless service."
"You can just call them. I find their support fantastic, and their priority is making sure you're happy."
"The team brought unique skills and experience. However, their greatest strength was to clearly understand the outcome we wanted and then support us in obtaining it with strong commercial advice."
"MinterEllison have a strong commercial and outcome focus. They also access the breadth of the firm, including their own tech consultancy, to deliver a seamless service."
"You can just call them. I find their support fantastic, and their priority is making sure you're happy."
Notable Practitioners
Peter Bartlett has practised in the media space for over 35 years, winning a reputation as a pre-eminent litigator of defamation cases and trusted adviser on the full range of publication risks facing both print and broadcast media. He is based in Melbourne.
"He's a market leader and easily the most experienced media lawyer in the country."
"Peter Bartlett is a market leader with a rare combination of skills for large-scale defamation and media litigation."
"Peter has unmatched experience in media and defamation law."
Paul Kallenbach spearheads the MinterEllison cybersecurity offering from the Melbourne office, advising on issues in that sphere and on a wide range of often complex technology procurement and implementation projects.
"His insight, experience and thoughts guided us carefully. He's co-operative and doesn't act without having our preference in mind. He's also intelligent and proactive."
"Paul is by far the most skilled and pragmatic legal counsel I've worked with."
"Paul Kallenbach is highly responsive, pragmatic and capable of complex, high quality drafting."
David Poulton specialises in the handling of contentious media matters and is an experienced litigator of defamation and contempt cases. Based in Melbourne, he also advises extensively on pre-publication issues in both the print and online media sectors.
Dean Levitan has risen to prominence for his role in proceedings brought by decorated war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith in Australia's so-called "defamation trial of the century".
"Dean Levitan is described as a star of the future, but I think he is already a star in media law."
"Dean's my favourite, he's just really fun. He's good at explaining exactly why the legal advice is used and is good enough that he's doing himself out of work."
"Dean is excellent. He's detail-focused, responsive, smart and a pleasure to deal with. He's someone whose advice I believe I could trust implicitly."