Neoh Kai Sheng

On the court record

Neoh Kai Sheng appears in the reported corpus as a commercial and company litigator, with civil procedure, privilege and shareholder disputes among the reported matters across the High Court and Court of Appeal. His civil-procedure work is visible in an application for leave to file a further affidavit after the exchange of affidavits and submissions, where the court weighed whether the delay had been satisfactorily explained and whether the evidence was truly new, relevant and necessary. A more distinctive matter concerns an application for interrogatories directed at a partner in a law firm, where the objection was that the information sought was privileged under section 126(1) of the Evidence Act 1950, engaged the partner's fiduciary duties, amounted to a fishing expedition and was not necessary for the fair disposal of the action — a study in the limits of pre-trial discovery against a legal adviser.

His company work appears in a shareholders' dispute over a share buy-back agreement where the buy-back price had not been agreed, requiring the court to consider the methodology for determining a reasonable buy-back price, including the Net Asset Valuation method, specific performance and section 9 of the Sale of Goods Act 1957. He was also engaged as respondent's counsel in a cluster of Court of Appeal appeals on the doctrine of deemed retirement — whether a director due to retire by rotation under a company's articles of association can be deemed to have retired where the annual general meeting was not held and the retiring directors were not re-elected. Across these reported decisions his work moves between the procedural machinery of commercial litigation, the law of privilege and the internal governance and valuation disputes of companies, and the matters mark Neoh Kai Sheng as counsel across company and general civil litigation, comfortable with both the interlocutory contest and the shareholder trial.