Joseph Liow
"The 'responsive, conscientious' Joseph Liow handles construction and employment disputes." The Legal 500
The first thing you will notice about Joseph is his self-confidence. He makes no bones about standing out from the crowd. Joe is a well-planned individual. In his late teens, he assessed his strengths and personality and made a decision to venture into law. Gregarious, extroverted and with a decent analytical ability, Joseph opted for a career that has allowed him to build on and his strengths and people skills.
Joseph, an ASEAN scholar, graduated from the National University of Singapore in 1992 and has been in legal practice since 1993. He heads one of our two litigation teams and handles commercial litigation and building construction disputes and arbitration. Technically and mathematically inclined, Joseph enjoys the challenge of complex building claims. Joseph started his career as a pupil with one of the two heritage firms that merged to form Straits Law Practice LLC in 2001 and he is one of the founding shareholders of Straits Law. He is a Fellow of the Singapore Institute of Arbitration, an Adjudicator appointed by the Singapore Mediation Centre and a lead trainer with the Law Society's Advocacy program. He is presently serving his second term as the Honorary Secretary of the Society of Construction Law (Singapore).
Joseph Liow can be contacted at 6514 1212 / joeliow@straitslaw.com.sg.
Practice Group
- Building & Construction Litigation
- Arbitration and Alternative Dispute Resolution
- Commercial Litigation
- Employment Law
Most Significant Legal Cases to Date
"A particular case where I was quite pleased with myself was when I was able to leverage on my own analytical skills and technical inclinations and successfully cross-examine an expert witness, without having any expert to assist me on a particular issue relating to delay occasioned in a building construction project.
I was acting for a concrete supplier who had supplied concrete that, for some unknown reason, showed unusual slow setting properties on two occasions. Their customer was building a factory and had, without knowing that the concrete had slow setting properties, struck off the formwork prematurely causing the columns that were being constructed with the same concrete to deform. This was a case where the customer was claiming that because of the supply of this particular batch of concrete, their works were delayed. A portion of that delay was alleged to be 12 days when the works were at the fifth floor of the factory, which worked out to be $120,000.00 given the fact that liquidated damages each day was $10,000.00. I was able to analyze the voluminous documents relied upon by the expert witness and realized that the delay was caused by something else other than our clients' slow-setting concrete. I cross-referenced various contemporaneous documents and deduced that the customer was not able to proceed with the fifth floor works, not because of any delay on our clients' part, but because the customer started their underground cabling works late and by digging around the building at that time, blocked the access to a tower crane that the customer needed to use in the construction of the fifth floor.
The customer was mischievously attempting to pass off its losses for their own delay in their works to our clients and its claim for the 12 days was denied."
