Maurice Blackburn Lawyers

Class Actions

Principal Lawyer

Lee Taylor is a Principal Lawyer in the Class Actions department of Maurice Blackburn's Melbourne office. He recently led the Slater & Gordon shareholder class action to a successful settlement and is currently working on a related shareholder action against Slater & Gordon’s former auditors, Pitcher Partners, and investigating further claims against other advisers to Slater & Gordon.

Since Lee joined Maurice Blackburn in 2012, he has achieved excellent results in the Air Cargo class action, and he was part of the team that delivered a settlement of $300 million to people affected by the Murrindindi Black Saturday bushfire. This is the second-largest settlement in Australian class action history, behind only the Kilmore East-Kinglake Black Saturday class action that the firm settled for $494 million.

Lee is a qualified barrister and solicitor in Victoria, and he is also a member of the State Bar of California, where he maintains his membership of the Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law section. Lee spent eight years practising in the United States, where he focused on antitrust law and class actions. He also maintained an active pro-bono practice in the US, representing defendants in death penalty and immigration appeals, and providing general legal advice to a non-profit organisation dedicated to ending domestic violence.

Lee is an experienced written and oral advocate who is particularly skilled in working with technical and economic experts, as well as trial preparation and strategy.

“I became a lawyer because I wanted to obtain compensation for people who, without a class action regime, would have no way of vindicating their rights,” says Lee.

“Class action practice is challenging and cutting edge, never routine or formulaic. The stakes are very high in our matters, and that raises the intensity of the litigation. At the same time, while class actions deal with big numbers in the aggregate, the class is made up of individuals whose claim, while perhaps only a small percentage of the overall number, is 100 per cent of that person’s claim.

“One of the best parts of my job is sending out the cheques to class members at the end of a class action. It’s great to see justice for everyday Australians.”

Lee graduated from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English in 1990 and a PhD in Literary Theory and Criticism in 1997. He graduated from the law school at Columbia University in New York with a Juris Doctor degree in 2003. While studying at Columbia, Lee travelled to the Czech Republic where he worked as an intern with a human and civil rights non-governmental organisation that focuses, among other things, on discrimination against the Roma community in Eastern Europe.

Law Institute of Victoria member Victorian Bar member State Bar of California member

BA (Hons), PhD, JD