Kumar Partnership

On the court record

Kumar Partnership is a Malaysian firm whose reported matters before the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan) are concentrated in contract and commercial litigation, with distinctive excursions into sports and professional-negligence law. Contract questions of consideration and variation recur. At Federal Court level the firm has argued a matter engaging section 26 of the Contracts Act 1950, the variation of a contract, estoppel and the practical-benefit test associated with Williams v Roffey Brothers, on whether performing an existing obligation can amount to valid consideration where it benefits the promisor. Its High Court contract work includes a misrepresentation dispute over pre-contractual representations, an entire-agreement clause and an alleged collateral contract under sections 92(a) and (b) of the Evidence Act 1950, and a summary-judgment matter on whether inaction amounted to agreement to vary an agreement's terms under sections 7, 57 and 63 of the Contracts Act 1950.

The firm's wider caseload is varied. It has litigated the enforceability of several sale and purchase agreements on a documents-only basis, a referral-agreement and brokerage dispute raising illegality, public policy, restitution and unjust enrichment in the engineering-consultancy field, and an application to amend a defence to add a counterclaim said to be designed to nullify an existing injunction. A distinctive matter concerns sports law: a dispute within a taekwondo association over the withdrawal of membership, an injunction under Order 29 of the Rules of Court 2012, the Sports Development Act 1997, the exhaustion of domestic remedies and the jurisdiction of the Olympic Council of Malaysia. In the professional-negligence and referral dispute the firm engaged illegality and public policy, restitution and unjust enrichment, testing whether an engineering-consultancy brokerage arrangement resting on an oral referral agreement was enforceable or void as contrary to public policy. The reported profile is that of a commercial-litigation practice with a firm grasp of the doctrines of consideration and variation that reach the apex court, complemented by unusual sports-governance and professional-negligence work.