Kia Pheng practiced as a disputes lawyer for about 30 years. He regularly appears as lead counsel in both trial work and at appellate hearings in the Supreme Court as well as in arbitration proceedings. His areas of practice include insolvency, bankruptcy, civil, corporate, and commercial litigation, shareholder disputes, property-related disputes, family disputes, and employment disputes.

For banking and insolvency matters, Kia Pheng acts for insolvency practitioners, banks, and debtors as well. His insolvency practice includes representing parties in cases of recognition of foreign insolvency proceedings and matters relating to US Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. A number of Kia Pheng’s cases have been reported in the Singapore Law Reports for being legally significant.

Notably, in 2006, Kia Pheng acted for a debtor company to successfully argue that under the provisions of the Companies Act, an action instituted by the judicial managers of the company to challenge a transaction entered into by the company with a third party on the ground of unfair preference or being at an undervalue, cannot be continued by the liquidators when judicial management of the company was followed by a winding up order before the action was adjudicated upon. This issue was described by the Court of Appeal in its decision as “a point of insolvency law which is of considerable importance to the general creditors of an insolvent company”.

Kia Pheng also acted as lead counsel for a globally renowned modelling agency incorporated in Switzerland in an international arbitration held in the SIAC in 2017 and 2018 against a BVI company that alleged breaches of an agency agreement between the parties. After successfully defending the Swiss respondent against the BVI claimant which was represented by a UK Queen’s Counsel before the arbitral tribunal, Kia Pheng successfully opposed an application filed in the High Court in Singapore by the BVI claimant to set aside the arbitral award.

Kia Pheng has previously been a facilitator in the Singapore Institute of Legal Education’s Preparatory Course for the Law and Practice of Arbitration subject leading to Part B of the Singapore Bar Examinations.