Kheng Hoe & Lee Yuen

On the court record

Kheng Hoe & Lee Yuen appears in the reported judgments as a construction and commercial-litigation practice, working mainly in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) with matters in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Building and construction law is the defining strand of its corpus, and in particular construction-payment adjudication under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA): applications under sections 15, 16 and 28 to set aside or enforce an adjudication decision between a developer and its piling contractor, and disputes over a construction contract where a claimant sought payment for work done. The firm's civil-procedure work is substantial and includes a mediation session conducted by a judicial commissioner and the questions that arise from it. Its company-law matters cover winding-up petitions on the just-and-equitable ground and under section 465 of the Companies Act 2016. A more unusual strand of its corpus concerns intellectual property and confidence — copyright infringement, breach of confidence and the misuse of confidential information — and it has appeared in arbitration. The counterparties in the corpus are largely construction and development companies. Acting for defendants, plaintiffs, respondents and petitioners across these matters, the firm presents as a construction-disputes practice whose corpus is built around CIPAA adjudication and the enforcement and setting aside of adjudication decisions, supported by winding-up, civil-procedure and intellectual-property work. The recurrence of adjudication matters, and of the setting-aside and enforcement applications that follow an adjudicator's decision, marks the firm as one embedded in the payment disputes that arise in the course of construction projects. In the adjudication matters the recurring questions are whether the adjudicator kept within jurisdiction, whether the decision should be enforced under section 28 or set aside under the grounds in the Act, and how an adjudicated sum interacts with the parties' broader contractual rights. Its intellectual-property and confidence work, though a smaller part of the docket, shows the same firm protecting a party's proprietary information and creative output, extending its reach beyond construction into the wider commercial field.