Peter Gordon    

National Practice Group Leader, Asbestos Litigation and Project Litigation, Melbourne

Peter Gordon is one of Australia's best known lawyers. He has forged a formidable reputation in a 28-year legal career fighting corporate giants and defending the rights of the underdog.

Since arriving at Slater & Gordon as an articled clerk in 1980, Peter has been an instrumental player in legal firsts and landmark cases against “some of the biggest and most toxic corporations in the world”.

He ran the first successful asbestos cancer negligence case in Australia in 1984 and the first successful tobacco case in 2002 (a result later reversed on appeal but it’s not over yet).

As well as conducting numerous class actions, Peter has successfully resolved over a thousand asbestos cancer cases and he conducted and successfully resolved the claims of every sufferer of medically acquired HIV / AIDS in Australia infected between 1980 and 1985.

He has pitted himself and the resources of Slater & Gordon against James Hardie, CSR, British American Tobacco, Philip Morris, the Catholic Church and various pharmaceutical companies.

He has acted in cases in courts in every state of Australia, as well as England, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and many parts of the United States, and attended legal conferences far and wide, from offices in New York’s Wall Street to the jungles of the Solomon Islands.

For all that, his greatest privilege he says has been acting on behalf of working people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, through no fault of their own. What he enjoys most remains unchanged – representing ordinary people, hearing their stories and working out the best way to secure them compensation.

It’s an ethos that runs deep in the corridors of Slater & Gordon, where he takes great pride in helping it to flourish in future generations of lawyers, and one that he shows no sign of abandoning.

He won the Australian Lawyers' Association's Civil Justice Award in 2000. He led the fight to save the Footscray Football Club (the Western Bulldogs) in 1989 serving as its President for the next seven years. This year, the Club made Peter its number one member.

Today, 20 years after his first legal action against a big pharmaceutical company, Peter Gordon finds himself assisting Slater & Gordon’s team working on the Vioxx class action on behalf of over 1000 sufferers of heart attacks and strokes who took this drug, against the resources and tactics of one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies. So far, as he says himself, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

You will also find him in the legal trenches still fighting asbestos companies and tobacco conglomerates, who might themselves say the same of Peter….”the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

To view a detailed biography of Peter Gordon, click here

 Expertise

• litigation
• asbestos
• tobacco
• major projects
• class actions

Career history

• Slater & Gordon, since 1995, senior partner 
• Slater & Gordon, 1989 partner
• Slater & Gordon, 1980 articled clerk

Professional qualifications & admissions

• 1986 Admitted, Supreme Court of Western Australia
• 1986 Admitted, Supreme Court of New South Wales
• 1981 Admitted, Supreme Court of Victoria
• 1980 Bachelor of Laws (Honours), University of Melbourne