Zain & Co.

On the court record

Zain & Co. appears in the reported judgments as a trusts, estate and administrative-law litigation practice, working across the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and appearing most often as respondent. A defining strand of its corpus concerns express trusts and the duties of a trustee, together with resulting and constructive trusts and the admissibility of evidence, argued at the Court of Appeal in litigation brought by the administrator of a deceased's estate. A distinct administrative-law strand concerns the fairness of a disciplinary process, including a matter in which a university academic challenged the legitimacy of an investigation committee and contended that a disciplinary appeal hearing was not fair and denied the right to cross-examine or respond, where the appeal was allowed because the decision was vitiated by those defects. The firm also appears in pre-action discovery under Order 24 rule 7A of the Rules of Court 2012, sought against a university, in interlocutory applications, and in an application for an extension of time to appeal, where the court weighed the length of and reasons for the delay, the merits of the appeal and the prejudice to the respondent, in a matter involving a social-security organisation. The counterparties in the corpus include universities, statutory bodies and the personal representatives of deceased estates. Acting most often as respondent, the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus centres on trusts and the administration of estates and on administrative-law challenges to the fairness of disciplinary and decision-making processes, a combination that joins the private law of trusts to the public-law requirements of procedural fairness, with the duties of trustees and the integrity of disciplinary procedures as recurring themes. The disciplinary-fairness matter is a significant one, since a decision reached without a fair hearing — where the affected person was denied the chance to cross-examine or respond — may be quashed however serious the underlying allegation, and the firm's corpus shows an appellate court holding a disciplinary decision vitiated for exactly that reason. Its trusts and estate work, by contrast, engages the private-law duties owed by a trustee or personal representative to the beneficiaries of an estate.