Category W & G Lawyers

This article was written by Grace Blake Solicitor at W & G Lawyers.

As society becomes increasingly digital, estate planning needs to evolve with it.

A modern estate can extend far beyond the traditional assets we think about when preparing a Will. Today, a person’s financial and personal affairs may include online share trading accounts, cryptocurrency, digital bank accounts, cloud-stored photographs and documents, social media accounts, online businesses, intellectual property and valuable digital records.

But what happens to those assets when you die?

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On 25 August, the W & G Lawyers team came together for this month’s Team Building activity. This time we headed to Zone Bowling for a relaxed — and slightly competitive — game of bowling, a welcome change of pace from our busy working lives.

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This article was co-authored by Nancy Wang Pricipal Solicitor and Jialin Liu Solicitor at W & G Lawyers. 

Consider a situation we now see in our office with some regularity. A professional woman in her forties sells an apartment she bought years before she met her partner, adds her savings, and pays the entire price of a new family home. The title — for reasons that seemed sensible at the time, or for no articulated reason at all — goes into joint names, or into her partner’s name alone. The relationship later ends, and she asks the question every family lawyer dreads answering in a single sentence: whose house is it?

The honest answer is that it depends on which body of law is asked, and how long the relationship lasted. The equitable doctrines — resulting trusts, constructive trusts and the presumption of advancement — give one answer. The Family Law Act 1975 (Cth), substantially rewritten with effect from 10 June 2025, gives another. This article works through both, and explains why the passage of time quietly transfers power from the first to the second.

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This article was written by Jialin Liu Solicitor at W & G Lawyers. 

Cross-border debt recovery: requirements, procedure and key risks

You have obtained a favourable judgment in China, but the judgment debtor has moved to Australia or holds real property, bank accounts, company shares or other assets here. Whether the judgment can be enforced in Australia usually turns on two separate questions:

• whether the Chinese judgment satisfies the Australian common law requirements for recognition; and
• whether the judgment debtor has assets in Australia against which enforcement can practically occur.

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This article was written by Grace Blake Solicitor at W & G Lawyers.

Being left out of a Will is hard enough on its own. Where the deceased owned property in another country, or where you live overseas yourself, the position becomes more complicated, and the expensive mistakes tend to be made in the first few weeks, before anyone has thought to get advice.

A good deal of our estate work involves families whose assets and relationships cross borders. A parent who migrated to Queensland but kept an apartment in Shanghai. An adult child overseas who hears months after the funeral that they have been left out. Queensland’s family provision laws apply to these estates, but they cannot always reach every asset, and the result is often not what families expect.

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On 1 August 2026, Councillor Steven Huang, Brisbane City Councillor and Deputy Chair of Council, celebrated his 15th anniversary in public service at a special dinner held at Maple Garden Restaurant in Brisbane.

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This article was written by Nancy Wang Principal Solicitor at W & G Lawyers.

From 1 October 2026, Australian businesses will no longer be permitted to apply card payment surcharges on most card transactions.

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—First in a series on the litigation legacy of the Business Innovation and Investment Program

This article was written by Nancy Wang Principal Solicitor at W & G Lawyers.

In March 2018, Ms Yang transferred $3.5 million to an Australian company called Axis North Pty Ltd. Within seven days the money was gone — passed to a related company, and from there to the mother of the man who controlled both. Ms Yang did not get it back. In July 2025 the Federal Court dismissed her claim with costs. In April 2026 the Full Court dismissed her appeal, again with costs.

Those two judgments — Yang v Wong [2025] FCA 693 (Derrington J) and Yang v Wong [2026] FCAFC 39 (Charlesworth, Jackman and Needham JJ) — are usually read as insolvency cases. They are important ones: the Full Court settled that the definition of “transaction” in s 588FDA of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) is narrower than the general definition in s 9, and that a “payment” from one party to another requires a change in the legal rights between them, not merely a flow of value.

But read the primary judgment closely and a second story emerges, one the appeal never touches. It is a story about why a person would hand over $3.5 million on terms that a Federal Court judge described as furnishing her with little or no protection — and about what her lawyers were, and were not, doing at the time.

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Planting trees in the backyard is a way of life in Brisbane. But the moment a branch reaches over the fence or a root cracks your neighbour’s pipes, things can get tense. Queensland has a law made for exactly these situations: the Neighbourhood Disputes (Dividing Fences and Trees) Act 2011 (the “Act”). Here’s how it works, in plain English.

This is general information, not legal advice for your specific situation. For an actual dispute, talk to a lawyer or the relevant government body.

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This article was written by Nancy Wang Principal Solicitor at W & G Lawyers. 

If you are a director of an Australian company, you almost certainly already have a director identification number — the 15-digit “director ID” that has been compulsory for new directors since 2021. Until now, that number has mostly sat quietly with the Australian Business Registry Services (ABRS), disconnected from the day-to-day life of your company.

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