WongPartnership

WongPartnership started life as specialist litigation firm Wong Meng Meng & Partners in 1992 and comprised a dozen lawyers.

Two years later, it merged with a corporate practice and became WongPartnership. Today, it has more than 270 lawyers and is one of Singapore’s largest firms. It handles arbitrations on a domestic level and across Asia.

The firm’s international arbitration practice is led by Alvin Yeo SC, a respected arbitrator and counsel. Yeo is a member of the LCIA court, the ICC commission on arbitration and SIAC’s council of advisers. At present, the team is handling almost 40 international arbitration matters. It was new entrant in the GAR 100 last year.

Network

In addition to Singapore, WongPartnership is in Shanghai, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Beijing.

Who uses it?

Astro All Asia Networks is one well-known client. It took advice from WongPartnership in a SIAC arbitration featuring claims of more than US$350 million.

Other clients include Unitas Capital, Hyundai Steel Company, Banyan Tree Holdings, Shanghai Electric Group and Yantai Raffles Shipyard. For Unitas – an offshoot of JPMorgan’s private equity – WongPartnership worked on a shareholder dispute arising from a US$260 million leveraged buyout of a Mauritius company.

Track record

Lengthy. One of the team’s early milestones was the successful defence of a dozen Asian airlines in 1998 after they were sued by a US computerised reservations system company for US$300 million. That ICC arbitration took place in London and spawned litigation in the courts of Atlanta, Georgia and Singapore.

More recently, the firm has won a US$230 million award for members of the Astro group of companies – an international media conglomerate. The award is currently being challenged in the Singapore courts.

In court, the team has been part of a number of precedent-setting cases about arbitration, including Tang Boon Jek Jeffrey v Tan Poh Leng Stanley and Holland v Toyo Engineering, as well as the recent win in AJT v AJU. In this last case, WongPartnership represented a Thai media company in a dispute with a BVI sports promoter – together the organisers of a Bangkok tennis tournament. The firm won a decision from the Singapore Court of Appeal upholding a SIAC award embodying a settlement agreement. The case has been credited with helping to define the scope of the public policy challenge to enforcement in Singaspore.

Recent events

The arbitration group picked up several new instructions last year, including the defence of a US$500 million SIAC arbitration claim.

Other new instructions will see it defend a US$30 million ICC arbitration involving a Taiwanese infrastructure project; and act for a casino resort in Singapore, two Malaysian shipbuilders, a Chinese shipyard and China state-owned dredging and oil companies.

It is taking on a US Fortune 500 company in US$16 million SIAC proceedings.