M Manoharan & Co.

On the court record

M Manoharan & Co. appears in the reported judgments as a civil, tort and public-interest litigation practice with occasional criminal matters, working mainly in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) with matters in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Tort and negligence are recurring themes, including a claim over the duty of care owed to a university student and a fatal accident resulting in the student's death, engaging the ingredients of duty, breach and causation and the assessment of damages under the fatal-accident provisions. A distinctive strand of the firm's corpus concerns deaths and treatment in state custody: a matter in which a detained person died and the question was whether a serious miscarriage of justice had occurred, and proceedings connected to police disciplinary authorities. The firm also appears in civil procedure, including the striking out of an amended writ and statement of claim, in evidence and the burden of proof, in a contentious probate matter resolved through the determination of a question of law under an interlocutory application, and in criminal justice, including a drug-trafficking prosecution in which the accused was acquitted at the close of the prosecution case. The counterparties in the corpus include corporate and public parties, among them a property-services company and a public university. Acting for plaintiffs, defendants, appellants and the accused across these matters, the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus joins tort and fatal-accident claims to public-interest matters touching detention and state accountability, alongside civil-procedure, probate and occasional criminal work, rather than resting on a single commercial specialism. The custody and disciplinary matters are the most distinctive strand, since they place the firm in the role of holding public authorities to account for what happens to those in their charge, a field in which the questions of duty, causation and procedural fairness carry particular public significance. The fatal-accident and negligence claims apply the same principles in the private sphere, testing whether a defendant's want of care caused a death and what damages should follow.