Lim Chee Wee Partnership

On the court record

Lim Chee Wee Partnership appears in the reported judgments as a high-value commercial and cross-border litigation practice, working across the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and taking positions on every side of the record. Its corpus is distinguished by its international and regulatory complexity. Company-law matters include the prohibition in section 123 of the Companies Act 2016 against a company acquiring its own shares. The firm appears in the enforcement of arbitral awards under the Arbitration Act 2005, including an ex parte enforcement order to enforce an award in a dispute between a Labuan production-system company and a petroleum operator, and in judicial review against the decision of the Competition Appeal Tribunal confirming a determination of the competition regulator. A particularly notable matter concerns jurisdiction over foreign parties — whether the Malaysian court has jurisdiction over an overseas law firm and individual, and whether Order 11 of the Rules of Court 2012 requires the claimant to establish jurisdiction for each cause of action before service out — in litigation brought by 1Malaysia Development Berhad. Its work also covers transfer of proceedings under Order 57, third-party proceedings under Order 16 rule 5, and contract disputes over the payment procedure in an addendum to a charterparty. The counterparties in the corpus include sovereign-linked and international parties such as 1Malaysia Development Berhad, Sabah Shell Petroleum and marine and construction companies. Acting for plaintiffs, defendants, appellants, respondents, applicants and interveners, the firm presents as a litigator built for complex, cross-border and regulatory disputes — arbitration enforcement, jurisdictional contests and competition and corporate matters — rather than for routine recovery. The jurisdictional dispute over service out of the jurisdiction is a good illustration of the firm's profile: the question is not the merits of the underlying claim but whether the Malaysian court may hear it against a foreign defendant at all, a threshold contest that decides where a multi-jurisdictional dispute will be fought. Its arbitration-enforcement and competition matters similarly turn on the interaction between domestic courts and specialist tribunals or arbitral panels, marking a practice that operates at the boundaries of the litigation system rather than in its ordinary run of trials.