Harold & Lam Partnership

On the court record

Harold & Lam Partnership appears in the reported judgments as a construction and property-development litigation practice, working across the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and, to a substantial degree, the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Two strands define its corpus. The first is housing-development litigation under the Housing Development (Control and Licensing) Act 1976 (HDA 1976), where the recurring questions concern a developer's obligations as to good workmanship, quality materials and the standard to be met in luxury housing, and the developer's liability to purchasers for shortcomings in what was delivered — matters in which the firm has appeared for a developer against multiple purchasers and their management body. The second is construction-payment adjudication under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA): applications to set aside or enforce an adjudication decision, where the issues are whether the adjudicator acted in excess of jurisdiction and whether the award should be set aside under the grounds in subparagraph 37 of the Act, including in a dispute between a main contractor and its builder. The firm also handles the assessment of damages on matters remitted from the Court of Appeal — for example a claim against a local authority remitted to the High Court for the assessment of quantum alone — and evidential contests within those proceedings. Its counterparties in the corpus include property and infrastructure companies such as Sime Darby Property (Bukit Jelutong) Sdn Bhd and other development and resources companies. Acting on both sides of the record — for plaintiffs, defendants, appellants and respondents in roughly even measure — the firm presents as a specialist in the interlocking fields of housing development, construction payment and the quantification of construction-related loss, rather than as a general commercial litigator. Its evidence-law matters and the confinement of remitted proceedings to the assessment of quantum alone round out a docket built around the life-cycle of a construction or housing project — from the standard of workmanship and the entitlement to payment through to the final measure of loss. The recurrence of appeals in its record, unusually high for a practice of its size, reflects how often these construction and housing questions are carried up to the Court of Appeal for final determination.