Alvin Lai Kok Wing

On the court record

Alvin Lai Kok Wing appears in the reported corpus as a commercial and construction litigator, with professional-conflict, adjudication and civil-procedure matters among the reported appearances at the High Court and Court of Appeal. His reported work includes an application to disqualify the plaintiff's legal firm from acting, on the ground that the firm's prior representation of the defendant in matters related to the same development project created a conflict of interest or a risk of the misuse of confidential information — a question that goes to the integrity of legal representation in related disputes. His construction-payment work appears in a Court of Appeal appeal, in which he acted as appellant's counsel, challenging an adjudicator's decision under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012, where the issue was whether the adjudicator had acted in excess of the jurisdiction conferred by section 27 — limited to the matter referred to adjudication — by allowing late-payment interest.

His reported work also reaches the mechanics of civil litigation. He was engaged in a matter on the discontinuance of an action, where the plaintiffs sought to discontinue their suit with liberty to file afresh and the defendants objected, the court weighing the effect on the defendants' rights, whether any injustice or collateral advantage arose, and the plaintiffs' position as dominus litis, and in a matter raising the unusual point that in civil proceedings the court has no power to invoke section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code to have a defendant detained for psychiatric observation without an application by a relative. Across these reported decisions his work moves between the conduct and ethics of representation, construction-payment adjudication and the procedural conduct of civil suits, marking Alvin Lai Kok Wing as counsel across commercial, construction and civil-procedure litigation. Across these reported decisions the common thread is the framework within which litigation is properly conducted — who may act, within what jurisdiction an adjudicator may decide, and on what terms a suit may be discontinued or a defendant examined — marking a practice attentive to the rules that govern commercial and construction disputes as much as to their merits.