Civil Cases

Witness Statements and the Abstraction of Justice

by

In Malaysia, witness statements contain the questions asked by a lawyer to his own witness with the answers given committed to writing. They serve as the evidence that a witness gives during an examination-in-chief (EIC) i.e., when it is his turn to testify. This process removes a significant part of a witness’s evidence from being actually heard by the court because it is read instead. It saves the courts, witnesses, lawyers and everyone involved effort, …

Read more

A bare handed win

by

My boss, Izzat, once told me a story about how he won an application after barely a minute of submission. It’s something I wished happened to me in my career but has not yet come my way. It was a summary judgment application pursuant to order 14 of the Rules of High Court 1980. A summary judgment is a ‘short cut’ procedure for claims that are straightforward. In such cases a court will not call …

Read more

Keep an open mind to gossip

by

No smoke without fire, as we like to say. But sometimes we mistake smoke for a cloud of kicked-up dust. There was a senior lawyer whom I had heard gossip about since I was in my second or third year of practice. The common complaint about him was his sharp practice. He was said to read out only those passages in the judgment that supported his argument and conveniently stopped or overlooked other parts of …

Read more

The Stinker of a Case

by

There will come a time in every litigator’s career when they will be called upon to conduct a case which contains absolutely no hope of success, without even the fig leaf of a remotely plausibly arguable point. It’s the case so devoid of merits, even saying ‘devoid of merits’ does not sufficiently describe how deep, inscrutable and mysterious that void in devoid is. It’s the case we are too embarrassed to discuss because we are …

Read more

The Transfer Application and the Forgotten Case

by

In my early years of practice, I acted for Uncle Chan, a close friend of my uncle, my mom’s brother. He always came around our popo’s house for a visit during Chinese New Year when we were kids. When he did, he always gave us a nice ang pow every year; nice refers to what is in the packet, not the packet. Who cares about the packet? He was one of the more generous visitors …

Read more