In July and August, the senior lawyer writers at Practical Law Australia continued to add new content across our practice areas, both filling out our offering and addressing new developments in law and legal life.

Our Commercial team published a new long form Standard document, Master service agreement for use in business-to-business transactions for the supply of services, and substantially updated our related Practice note, Service agreements and Checklist, Reviewing or drafting a service agreement.

AI also remains an area of focus for the Commercial team, with substantial updates being made to Practice note, AI and copyright, which discusses AI from the perspective of copyright law in Australia, and considers:

• how AI is used by creators;
• the subsistence of copyright in AI systems and AI-generated works and in particular;
• the originality and authorship challenges arising from AI-generated works; and
• copyright infringement issues.

Our Commercial Real Estate team published a new Practice note, Commercial and industrial property tax (Victoria): summary of transactional outcomes which gives a high-level summary of various transactional outcomes affecting commercial and industrial property in Victoria before and after entry into the commercial and industrial property tax (CIPT) regime under the Commercial and Industrial Property Tax Reform Act 2024 (Vic), which commenced on 1 July 2024.

Ahead of the 2024 annual general meeting, our Corporate Team published a new Checklist, Preparing for the 2024 AGM season, which sets out some key steps that a company can take to prepare for its AGM. The Corporate team has also added to our suite of private equity resources with a new Practice note, Common FIRB issues for private equity firms, which provides an overview of common issues that private equity (PE) firms can encounter when managing acquisitions of Australian businesses that have the potential to trigger a requirement for foreign investment approval from the Australian Treasury and the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB).

With the increasing prevalence of electronic discovery in commercial litigation, our Dispute Resolution team published a new suite of practice notes and standard documents on eDiscovery processes and protocols, including:

• Practice note, eDiscovery jargon buster;
• Standard documents Client data identification questionnaire and Document exchange protocol; and
• Quick guides to effectively using eDiscovery in a proceeding, preserving critical metadata in data self-collection and drafting an effective document exchange protocol.

With increasing take up of AI in the legal profession, our Dispute Resolution team also published Checklist, Guidelines on the use of GenAI in dispute resolution in Australia, which draws together guidelines on the use of Generative AI (GenAI) in dispute resolution issued by courts, bar associations and law societies across the states and territories of Australia.

Our employment team continues to update existing content for, and create new content responsive to, the ongoing program of employment law reform that has been central to the Albanese Government's legislative program. In July and August, this included:

• New content dealing with regulated workers following recent amendments to the Fair Work Act that commenced in August: Practice note, FW Act: Minimum conditions for regulated workers and Practice note, FW Act: Unfair deactivation or unfair termination of regulated workers;
• New content dealing with casual employees: Practice note, NES: Casual employee's choice to initiate conversion (from 26 August 2024) and Practice note, FW Act: The meaning of casual employee (from 26 August 2024);
• Substantial updates to Practice note: overview, Fixed term employment, Practice note, The general protections against sham arrangements, and Practice note, FW Act: The meaning of casual employee (pre-26 August 2024); and
• A new fact sheet on FY2024-2025 Labour key facts and figures, with substantial updates to the accompanying Help and information note.

One of the most topical reforms to employment law to commence in August 2024 was the new statutory right to disconnect. Practical Law's Employment Team have covered this new right in two practice notes that have been on our site for months, and are linked here for ease of reference:

• Practice note, FW Act: Right to disconnect (1): Operation of the right; and
• Practice note, FW Act: Right to disconnect (2): Dispute resolution and orders.

To keep track of all new and featured updated content on Practical Law, visit our What's New page.