Huai Yuan is a partner in our Litigation, Dispute Resolution and Arbitration practice groups. He is also a partner of the firm’s employment, insurance and white-collar crime/investigation practices, and has been ranked in several publications, including The Legal 500 Asia-Pacific as a practitioner of note and a key lawyer in the fields of employment, dispute resolution and insurance, Asian Legal Business (a publication of Thomson Reuters) as one of Asia’s Super 50 disputes lawyers and one of Singapore’s Rising Stars in the law, Benchmark Litigation Asia Pacific as a Future Star, and Singapore Business Review as one of Singapore’s 30 most influential lawyers under 40. He has successfully represented clients in all levels of court, including the Court of Appeal, and in arbitration proceedings.
After graduating from the National University of Singapore’s Law Faculty with First Class Honours in Law and several awards (such as the Law Society of Singapore Book Prize for being the top student in his third year of studies), Huai Yuan was selected to assist the Chief Justice and judges of the Singapore Supreme Court as a Justices’ Law Clerk (“JLC”). The JLC scheme is an elite government programme by which top law graduates are selected to serve as judicial assistants / associates and provide assistance and counsel to Supreme Court judges in select cases. During his stint as a JLC, Huai Yuan was involved in several landmark judgments spanning a variety of fields, including cases on the following specialised hearing lists: Complex & Technical Cases, Finance, Securities, Banking and Complex Commercial Cases, Company, Insolvency and Trusts, Arbitration, Tort and Employment Claims, Public Law and Judicial Review.
Huai Yuan has also served as a Deputy Public Prosecutor and State Counsel with the Attorney-General’s Chambers (where he handled a wide range of cases involving white and blue collar crimes, as well as advised on enforcement and regulatory matters), and has experience as a Teaching Fellow in the National University of Singapore’s Law Faculty where he taught Company Law (the module of which has a component on insolvency). Huai Yuan is also an accomplished writer, having contributed to a leading legal treatise and several legal articles overseas (in the United States and UK) and in Singapore. A full listing of the publications can be found on his firm profile under the section “Insights”.
In 2018, Huai Yuan was appointed onto the Singapore Supreme Court’s panel of lawyers (known as amicus curiae) tasked with assisting it on important questions of law of public interest. In a matter in which he assisted on as amicus curiae, his submissions were commended in a reported decision for “greatly assisting” the Court in arriving at its decision (see TWD and another v UQE [2018] SGHCF 21 at [30]-[32], [41], [52], [63]-[64], [87]).
