Case Details
- Citation: [2022] SGHC 107
- Title: Ten Leu-Jiun Jeanne-Marie v Peter Low LLC and others
- Court: High Court of the Republic of Singapore (General Division)
- Date of Decision: 17 May 2022
- Judge: Choo Han Teck J
- Proceeding: Registrar’s Appeal No 299 of 2021
- Underlying Suit: Suit No 1123 of 2016
- Hearing/Reservation: Judgment reserved; hearing date indicated as 26 April 2022
- Plaintiff/Applicant: Ten Leu-Jiun Jeanne-Marie
- Defendants/Respondents: Peter Low LLC; Choo Zheng Xi; Peter Cuthbert Low; Christine Low
- Legal Area: Civil Procedure — Striking Out
- Nature of Claim: Professional negligence and related civil wrongs arising from conduct in prior litigation (the “NUS Suit”)
- Key Procedural Event Challenged: Assistant Registrar’s decision striking out portions of the Statement of Claim (SOC)
- Representation: Plaintiff in person; defendants represented by Ramesh Selvaraj and Hiew E-Wen, Joshua (Allen & Gledhill LLP)
- Statutes Referenced: Fourth Act, SOC insofar as the Fourth Act
- Cases Cited: [2022] SGHC 107
- Judgment Length: 7 pages, 1,573 words
Summary
Ten Leu-Jiun Jeanne-Marie v Peter Low LLC and others [2022] SGHC 107 concerns a striking-out dispute in a civil action brought by a former client against her former solicitors. The plaintiff alleged that the defendants’ conduct in an earlier case against the National University of Singapore (“NUS”) caused her to lose. After the Assistant Registrar (“AR”) struck out most of the plaintiff’s Statement of Claim (“SOC”), the plaintiff appealed. The High Court (Choo Han Teck J) allowed the appeal and set aside the AR’s decision, emphasising that striking out must be based on the pleaded case “on the face of the pleadings”, not on a court’s own rephrasing or fact-finding.
Although the court acknowledged that the SOC was “an untidy mess” and that the defendants had a temptation to seek a swift end to the litigation, the judge held that the AR had effectively engaged in impermissible reconstruction of the plaintiff’s pleaded case. In particular, the judge criticised the AR for relying on a lack of damage analysis that did not clearly follow from the plaintiff’s own pleaded allegations. The High Court therefore restored the plaintiff’s action to proceed to trial, with costs “in the cause”.
What Were the Facts of This Case?
The plaintiff, Ten Leu-Jiun Jeanne-Marie, brought Suit No 1123 of 2016 against her former solicitors, Peter Low LLC and individual solicitors within the firm. The underlying complaint was that the defendants had mishandled her earlier litigation against NUS, referred to in the judgment as the “NUS Suit” (Suit No 667 of 2012). In the NUS Suit, the plaintiff retained the first defendant, Peter Low LLC, and the second and third defendants were solicitors who acted for her. The fourth defendant, Christine Low, was the daughter of the third defendant and a trainee lawyer at the firm at the material time.
In or around January 2014, the plaintiff discharged the defendants from acting for her in the NUS Suit. She then engaged other lawyers, including Mr M Ravi and later Mr Christopher Anand Daniel, who acted for her at the trial stage. The trial in the NUS Suit took place in August 2017 and January 2018. Ultimately, on or around 9 July 2018, Justice Woo Bih Li dismissed the plaintiff’s claims against NUS.
Following the dismissal, the plaintiff filed a 68-page SOC on 21 October 2016 in the present action against the defendants. The SOC alleged negligence in the defendants’ conduct in the NUS Suit. Beyond negligence, the plaintiff pleaded a range of causes of action including breach of contract, fraudulent and/or negligent misrepresentation, the tort of deceit, breach of fiduciary duties, and unlawful conspiracy. The breadth of pleaded civil wrongs reflected the plaintiff’s narrative that her loss in the NUS Suit was attributable to the defendants’ professional failings.
Procedurally, the defendants applied in Summons No 6061 of 2018 to strike out the SOC on the grounds that it disclosed no reasonable cause of action, was frivolous and/or vexatious, and constituted an abuse of process. The application was heard by an AR. The AR concluded that the plaintiff’s claims essentially fell into six “acts” and struck out portions relating to five of them, while allowing the “Fourth Act” to proceed because the AR found a triable issue regarding what was represented during a telephone conversation on or around 5 November 2013.
What Were the Key Legal Issues?
The central legal issue was whether the AR had properly applied the striking-out test. Striking out is a serious procedural step: it effectively prevents a party from pursuing a claim to trial. The High Court therefore had to consider whether the AR’s approach remained within permissible bounds—namely, assessing whether the pleaded case discloses a reasonable cause of action—without engaging in fact-finding or reconstructing the plaintiff’s case.
A related issue concerned the proper treatment of “damage” (or loss) in the pleaded causes of action. The AR had relied heavily on the absence of loss as an essential component of the claims, concluding that the plaintiff could not prove she suffered loss because she did not succeed in the NUS Suit despite engaging new counsel and attempting to amend her SOC. The High Court had to decide whether this reasoning was consistent with the pleaded allegations and whether it improperly substituted the court’s own analysis for the plaintiff’s pleaded case.
Finally, the appeal raised a practical pleading issue: the SOC was described as excessive, disorganised, and difficult to parse. The High Court had to determine whether the AR could summarise and paraphrase the SOC into “six acts” and then strike out based on that paraphrase, or whether doing so crossed the line into impermissible judicial reconstruction.
How Did the Court Analyse the Issues?
Choo Han Teck J began by framing the procedural posture and the AR’s approach. The AR had identified six main acts underlying the plaintiff’s claims and struck out the portions relating to the First, Second, Third, Fifth and Sixth Acts, while leaving the Fourth Act intact. The Fourth Act concerned an alleged fraudulent or negligent misrepresentation and related tortious and fiduciary claims arising from what the second defendant allegedly told the plaintiff during a telephone conversation on or around 5 November 2013. The AR found a triable issue on that representation and therefore did not strike out the claims tied to the Fourth Act.
On appeal, the plaintiff’s core complaint was that the AR had engaged in fact-finding. The plaintiff argued that in a striking-out application, the court should focus on the facts as pleaded “on the face of the pleadings”. The High Court accepted the thrust of this submission. While the judge did not deny that the SOC was problematic, the court’s role in striking out is not to rewrite the case or to decide factual disputes prematurely. The judge’s criticism was directed at the AR’s method: summarising and paraphrasing the SOC in a way that then allowed the AR to strike out based on a version of the case that was not strictly the plaintiff’s pleaded case.
The High Court’s reasoning also addressed the “damage” analysis. The AR’s main ground for striking out was that the plaintiff could not show loss because she did not succeed in the NUS Suit, even after discharging the defendants and engaging new counsel. The High Court observed that the lack of damage was not clearly absent from the SOC. Although the SOC did not always state the point in clear terms, the judge noted that the plaintiff was effectively asserting damage—“I lost my case”—even if she did not plead it in those exact words. The defendants’ position, as reflected in the judgment, was not that damage was not pleaded, but that there was a defence of an intervening force that shielded the defendants’ advice from criticism at trial.
In other words, the defendants’ argument was essentially that later events (including the plaintiff’s subsequent litigation choices and the involvement of new counsel) broke the causal chain or otherwise meant the defendants’ alleged errors could not be said to have caused loss. The High Court indicated that this kind of defence is typically a matter for trial, not for striking out. The judge suggested that if the defendants had “incontrovertible evidence” even in the plaintiff’s evidence that there was no damage due to a supervening event, then the court might consider whether there is no case to answer. But that is not what the AR had done; instead, the AR had treated the issue as determinative at the striking-out stage.
Importantly, the judge’s approach was not to endorse the plaintiff’s pleading quality. The judgment contains pointed observations that the SOC was excessive and breached pleading and writing rules to such an extent that it was “almost impossible” to identify specific portions for striking out. The judge also acknowledged that the defendants had “succumbed to the temptation” to seek a swift end. However, the High Court emphasised that even if the SOC is poorly drafted, the court must still strike out only on the plaintiff’s own pleaded case. The court should not “rephrase a plaintiff’s claim, and then strike it out on the court’s version of it.” This is a key procedural safeguard: striking out must be anchored in the pleadings, not in judicial reconstruction.
Finally, the High Court addressed the practical consequences of allowing the appeal. The judge noted the irony that the plaintiff succeeded in spite of, or perhaps because of, her own badly drafted claim. The court’s decision was procedural rather than substantive: it was not a finding that the plaintiff’s claims were necessarily strong, but that the AR’s process and reasoning did not justify striking out at that stage.
What Was the Outcome?
The High Court allowed the plaintiff’s appeal and set aside the AR’s decision to strike out the SOC (at least as far as the appeal challenged it). The practical effect is that the plaintiff’s action would proceed to trial rather than being curtailed by striking out. This preserves the plaintiff’s ability to test her pleaded allegations through evidence and cross-examination.
The court also ordered that costs “here and below” be costs “in the cause”. This means the costs consequences would depend on the outcome at trial, rather than being fixed immediately. For the plaintiff, this reduces the immediate financial risk of the appeal but does not eliminate the possibility of an adverse costs order if the trial judge dismisses the action.
Why Does This Case Matter?
Ten Leu-Jiun Jeanne-Marie v Peter Low LLC and others is a useful authority for the proper scope of striking-out applications in Singapore civil procedure. The decision reinforces that courts must not engage in fact-finding or reconstruct a party’s case when deciding whether a pleading discloses a reasonable cause of action. Even where pleadings are messy or difficult to parse, the court’s task is to assess what is pleaded, not to improve or reinterpret the pleading into a different case and then strike it out.
For practitioners, the case highlights a tension that often arises in litigation management: courts and defendants may be frustrated by poor pleadings, and there may be a temptation to summarise and streamline. However, the High Court’s reasoning shows that summarisation must not become judicial rewriting. The decision therefore supports a disciplined approach to striking out: the court should identify the pleaded elements and assess whether, assuming the pleaded facts to be true (for the purpose of the application), the legal claim is reasonably arguable.
From a pleading strategy perspective, the case also illustrates that even inadequate drafting may survive if the pleaded case, read fairly, contains the essential allegations needed to establish a cause of action. Conversely, it signals that defendants should be cautious about relying on causation and damage arguments that depend on evidence or factual inferences. Where the defence is essentially an intervening event or supervening cause, it may be more appropriate to address it at trial rather than at the striking-out stage.
Legislation Referenced
- Fourth Act, SOC insofar as the Fourth Act
Cases Cited
- [2022] SGHC 107
Source Documents
This article analyses [2022] SGHC 107 for legal research and educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult the full judgment for the Court's complete reasoning.