Chee Hoe & Associates

On the court record

Chee Hoe & Associates appears in the reported judgments as an administrative-law and strata-litigation practice with a strong appellate profile, dividing its work evenly between the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and appearing most often as appellant. A recurring strand of its corpus is judicial review, including appeals against a High Court judge's decision upholding a finding of the Industrial Court on the dismissal of an employee, in a matter involving an airline, and judicial review of a decision of the Strata Management Tribunal brought by a management corporation. A distinct and substantial strand concerns the governance of stratified developments: legal questions on the validity of a bifurcated management structure in a mixed development, whether a developer and commercial parcel owners on the one hand, and residential parcel owners who had paid charges on the other, were correctly treated, and the statutory framework governing common property and the indivisibility of a management scheme, in litigation involving a residential management body and a developer. It also appears in disputes over the rates of maintenance charges imposed on car parks in a commercial development. The counterparties in the corpus include property developers, a management corporation and an airline. Acting most often as appellant, and with half its matters at the Court of Appeal, the firm presents as a practice whose corpus centres on strata-management governance and the judicial review of tribunal and Industrial Court decisions — the administrative and property-law fields in which the disputes of stratified communities and dismissed employees are carried up for appellate review. The bifurcated-management matters are a particularly substantial strand, since they require the court to work out how the common property of a mixed residential-and-commercial development is to be managed and how the charges are to be apportioned between owners with different interests, questions of growing importance as such developments proliferate. Its Industrial Court judicial reviews, by contrast, test whether a tribunal's finding on a dismissal was one it was entitled to reach on the material before it.