Lee & Poh Partnership

On the court record

Lee & Poh Partnership appears in the reported judgments as a construction, company and commercial-litigation practice, working mainly in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) with occasional matters reaching the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan). Construction and building law is a defining strand: the enforcement of an adjudication decision under section 28 of the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA), and the interaction between an adjudicated debt and a winding-up petition, including whether a Fortuna injunction should restrain a petition founded on a CIPAA debt that remains payable. Its company work covers winding up and the circumstances in which a company may resist a creditor's petition. Civil procedure recurs prominently — applications for security for costs, where the corpus records the balance between an enforcement risk and the danger of stifling a genuine claim through an oppressive order, and the treatment of an overlapping counterclaim — as well as the striking out of a claim and defence to a counterclaim. A distinct feature of its matters is the question of a litigant's right to counsel of choice and the court's inherent power to bar counsel where a conflict arises. The firm has also acted in appeals involving statutory landowners such as the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA). Its counterparties in the corpus include construction and development companies such as China Construction Yangtze River (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd and Icon City Development Sdn Bhd. Acting across plaintiff, defendant, respondent and third-party positions, the firm presents as a litigator strong in construction-payment enforcement, company insolvency and the interlocutory machinery of commercial disputes. Its matters also include appeals from decisions of the courts below and the striking out of a claim together with the defence to a counterclaim, and its corpus reaches the apex court in at least one matter, indicating that the construction and company questions it argues are of a kind that attract final appellate scrutiny. The mix of adjudication enforcement, winding-up defence and security-for-costs practice reflects a firm whose work sits at the meeting point of construction disputes and corporate insolvency.