A security company's push for indemnity costs against an injured woman fell flat - undone by its own failure to hand over key documents until the eve of trial.
The NSW District Court on September 18, 2026 dismissed a motion by Urban Protection Group to recover indemnity costs from a woman who was injured at Hotel Ravesis on Bondi Beach in July 2022.
The woman had been at the Bondi Beach hotel when a patron became violent with a security guard. She stepped in to help the guard during the altercation and was injured when both men fell on top of her. She sued the hotel operator (Debilu Pty Ltd, trading as Ravesis on Bondi Beach), Urban Protection Group as the security contractor, and a third company, Ample Security Service Pty Ltd (trading as Dark Haus Security), which had supplied the guard through a subcontracting arrangement.
The subcontracting chain was at the heart of the dispute. Urban had been engaged by Ravesis to provide security, but had in turn subcontracted the work to Dark Haus. The security guard on duty that night - the one the woman tried to help - was a Dark Haus employee, not Urban's. He wore Urban's uniform and signed Urban's time register, but his employment sat with Dark Haus.
In the primary judgment earlier in 2026, the court found the woman's claim against Urban failed on three grounds: the security guard was employed by Dark Haus, the guard was not personally negligent, and the people who should have responded to his radio calls for backup were either Dark Haus employees or Ravesis staff - not Urban's people.
Having won at trial, Urban wanted more. It sought indemnity costs based on five settlement offers made between May 2023 and November 2024. Most were substantially the same deal: judgment for Urban, no order as to costs. One, sent in February 2024, took a different form - an invitation to discontinue the proceedings, with a possible waiver of costs - and came with pointed warnings that Urban would call additional evidence at trial, rely on the correspondence for an indemnity costs application, and potentially seek a garnishee award to enforce any costs order.
In legal terms, these are all "walk away" offers, where the compromise is the offeror giving up its right to pursue costs against the other side. Courts have a broad discretion to order indemnity costs when a party rejects such an offer and then achieves a worse result at trial, drawing on the well-known Calderbank principles and rule 42.15A of the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules.
On the face of it, Urban had a strong hand. The woman lost entirely against Urban and ended up with a costs order against her - a worse outcome than every offer she had been given.
But the court found that the woman could not reasonably have been expected to accept any of the offers because Urban had not given her enough information to assess her position.
The critical gap was this: even though Urban told the woman as early as May 2023 that the security guard was a Dark Haus employee, she did not know whether the other security guards working at Ravesis that night were Urban employees or Dark Haus employees. That mattered because if any of them were Urban's people, they could have responded to the guard's radio calls for help - and their failure to do so could still have grounded liability against Urban under the pleaded case.
The answer only emerged at the last possible moment. Hotel Ravesis' Standard Operating Procedures - described by the court as a "very important document" - were not produced by Urban until August 6, 2025, just 12 days before the hearing began. An "activity report" that confirmed the employment status of the other guards was produced on August 19, 2025, the second day of trial.
The court noted that no adequate explanation had been provided for the late production of either document. Both were, in the court's words, "vital to the applicant's case, lethal to the respondent's case" - and both came well after all five of Urban's settlement offers.
The court drew on Morris v McEwen, a South Australian Supreme Court decision where incomplete discovery disqualified a party from relying on a Calderbank offer. While stopping short of labelling Urban's conduct "disentitling," the court found the late disclosure was the crucial factor. Without those documents, the woman was in no position to carefully assess her case. The application had to fail.
Academic commentary cited in the decision reinforced the point: a "walk away" offer made before the parties are fully informed of each other's strengths and weaknesses is less likely to attract costs consequences than one made at a later, better-informed stage. Here, none of Urban's offers were made at a point where the woman had the information she needed.
The motion was dismissed. Urban was ordered to pay the woman's costs of the application.
For liability insurers and claims teams, the decision is a pointed reminder that Calderbank offers are only as strong as the disclosure behind them - a party that withholds key documents cannot later complain that the other side should have known when to fold.
