A small firm, on purpose.
We are 21 lawyers in one Kuala Lumpur office, led by 5 partners. You are introduced at the outset to the people who will run your matter, and they stay with it to the end.
Cheah Su-Lin
Su-Lin founded the firm in 2009 after a decade in the disputes department of a large full-service practice. She leads the firm’s commercial litigation and insolvency work, from urgent injunctions and freezing orders to contested winding-up and scheme-of-arrangement proceedings. She is known for taking cases apart early — deciding, before the pleadings close, which two or three issues actually decide the matter.
Aravind Menon
Aravind co-founded the firm to build a disputes practice that could run an arbitration end to end without briefing it out. He appears as counsel in AIAC and ad hoc arbitrations and in adjudications under CIPAA 2012, and sits as an arbitrator in construction and commercial references. He reads a set of accounts as comfortably as a contract, which is often where construction disputes are won or lost.
Datuk Wong Kok Leong
Kok Leong joined as a partner in 2015 to lead the firm’s advocacy at the appellate level. He has argued in the Court of Appeal and the Federal Court across a range of commercial subjects, and supervises the firm’s written submissions — the part of a case, he maintains, that a court reads most carefully and remembers longest.
Nadia Farihah binti Zainal
Nadia leads the firm’s employment disputes practice, acting for employers and senior executives in unfair-dismissal claims under s.20 of the Industrial Relations Act 1967, constructive-dismissal references and Industrial Court proceedings. She spends as much time on the domestic inquiry before a dismissal as on the reference after it — most cases, she says, are decided by the paperwork nobody wanted to do at the time.
Rajesh Kumaran
A civil engineer before he read law, Rajesh runs the firm’s construction disputes practice. He handles adjudications under CIPAA 2012, arbitrations arising from standard-form contracts (PAM, PWD, FIDIC) and the enforcement and setting-aside applications that follow. He is fluent in the programme, the payment certificate and the extension-of-time claim — the documents most construction disputes actually turn on.
Genevieve Loh Mei Yee
Genevieve handles the firm’s shareholder and partnership disputes, including minority-oppression petitions under s.346 of the Companies Act 2016, deadlock and buy-out disputes, and derivative actions. She is careful with the company’s books early, because the remedy a court will grant usually depends on what the accounts and the register can be made to show.
Firdaus Hakim bin Rosli
Firdaus leads the firm’s public-law and judicial-review work, challenging and defending the decisions of regulators, licensing authorities and disciplinary bodies. He watches the clock closely: judicial review must ordinarily be commenced within three months, and much of his early advice is simply about not losing the right to be heard.
Tan Yi Xuan
Yi Xuan works across the firm’s commercial litigation matters, from drafting pleadings and interlocutory applications to preparing witnesses and bundles for trial. She does the close reading that lets the partners argue the case — the chronology, the documents and the discrepancies that a cross-examination is built from.
Priya Balakrishnan
Priya supports the firm’s arbitration and construction practice, managing document production, expert evidence and the procedural timetable that keeps a reference on track. She is often the person who knows where every document in a construction dispute lives, which in a large arbitration is worth a great deal.
Cheah Menon also comprises associates, pupils in chambers and practice-support staff not listed here, making up the firm’s complement of 21 lawyers.