For Singapore business owners and directors
5 Simple Ways To Keep Your Commercial Dispute Closer To S$15,000 Than S$540,000
Those are both real numbers for the same dispute.
Settle it early and you are near the bottom. Take it to a five-day trial and you are near the top.
Which end you land on is decided mostly in the first few weeks, usually before anyone has instructed a lawyer. This free guide sets out the five ways to stay at the cheaper end.
Free. No cost and no obligation.
15-minute read
Where the money in a dispute actually goes
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What you will get in the guide
The 1 decision that determines whether your matter settles at the pleadings stage or runs to a five-day trial, and the roughly S$525,000 difference between those two outcomes in actual fees.
Why a debtor who looks like they have nothing is still worth claiming against, how long a judgment stays enforceable once you hold one, and what waiting costs you in the meantime.
Why S$6,000 to S$16,000 disappears for every single day your matter spends in court, and what actually decides how many of those days there are.
The 2-part fee question that tells you more than any hourly rate, plus exactly what to get in writing before you sign an engagement letter.
The 4 mistakes we see most often when businesses handle disputes, including the one that quietly costs the most and surfaces last.
3 things clients tell us they wish they had known, including why winning a judgment and recovering the money are two separate exercises with two separate bills.
…and much more.
Written by the lawyers who would handle your matter
Triangle Legal LLC is a corporate and disputes practice in Singapore. We act for businesses, directors and shareholders on commercial disputes, debt recovery and enforcement, corporate and commercial matters, and insolvency and restructuring.
The guide was written by our own lawyers, from the questions clients actually ask in first meetings and the ones they tell us afterwards they wish they had asked sooner.
Nico Lee
Managing Director
Civil litigation and corporate and commercial advisory.
Sean Lee
Director
Called to the Singapore Bar since 2017. Specialises in commercial litigation, corporate transactions, insolvency matters and regulatory compliance – with C-suite in-house experience.
Joyce Soh
Associate
Admitted as an Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore in 2025.
Does any of this sound familiar?
A customer who owes you a significant sum has gone quiet, and the polite reminders have stopped working.
Your co-founder has stopped replying, and you are no longer sure whether this business has two decision makers or one.
You have been locked out of the company accounts and nobody will tell you on whose instruction.
You found payments in the ledger you never approved, and you have not raised it with anyone yet.
You signed a shareholders’ agreement years ago and have no idea whether it helps you in the situation you are now in.
A demand letter has arrived with a deadline on it, and you do not know whether that deadline is real.
You put money into an investment introduced by a friend or a self-styled expert, and the person who took it has disappeared.
A dispute with your building’s MCST has escalated, and you have just been told it may end up before the Strata Titles Board.
You have already spent more on this problem than you expected to, and it has not moved.
If you recognised more than one of those, the guide is written for you.
The expensive version and the cheap version of the same dispute look identical at the start
Two companies, comparable disputes, comparable sums at stake. One resolves in six weeks for the price of a properly drafted letter and a negotiation. The other is still going eighteen months later, has paid many times more, and settles for roughly what was on the table at the beginning.
The difference is almost never the merits of the claim. It is not luck, and it is not which firm they picked.
It is a handful of decisions taken early, usually before either side has instructed anyone. Whether the first letter was right. Whether anyone checked the other side could actually pay. Whether the route was chosen deliberately or simply arrived at.
By the time a matter is four months old, you are largely paying for the consequences of those decisions rather than making new ones. That is the uncomfortable part. The window in which the cost is genuinely controllable is short, and it closes quietly.
This guide is written for a specific reader
It is for you if:
You run or direct a Singapore business and money is in dispute, or about to be
The matter is a commercial or shareholder dispute, money owed to you, a corporate transaction, or a company under financial pressure
The sum at stake is large enough that the difference between roughly S$15,000 and S$540,000 in legal fees actually matters to you
It is probably not for you if:
You are looking for a template to handle the matter yourself
The claim is small enough for a forum designed to work without lawyers, in which case we would tell you so rather than take the work
You need family, criminal, immigration or conveyancing advice, which are not areas we practise in
What happens after you enter your email
The guide is emailed to the address you enter, as a PDF, usually within a minute. Keep the email and you still have it next week. Nothing is held back and there is no second form.
We will also offer you a complimentary case assessment of 10 minutes. That is a short conversation with one of our lawyers to work out what kind of matter you have and roughly where in that cost table it currently sits. It is not a consultation, and there is no cost and no obligation to instruct us afterwards.
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Questions people ask before they download this
Is this actually free?+
Yes. No cost, no card details, no obligation. We wrote it because the decisions in it are the ones we would want a member of our own family to get right before instructing anybody, including us.
Are those cost figures real?+
Yes. They are the Supreme Court's own published guidelines, set out in Appendix G to the Practice Directions. They are not our fees, and they are not a number we invented.
For a commercial claim the guidelines run:
A five-day trial therefore sits at S$55,000 to S$180,000, and the court keeps its discretion to depart from these ranges in a particular case.
One thing matters more than any of those figures. They are what a losing party is ordered to pay the winner, not what a matter costs to run. As a general rule a winning party recovers about a third of what it actually spent. That is how S$180,000 recoverable becomes closer to S$540,000 in fees, and how the pleadings band becomes roughly S$15,000 to S$42,000.
Will this tell me whether I have a good case?+
No, and be wary of anything that claims to. No guide, and no lawyer in a first conversation, can properly tell you that. What this does is show you where the money in a dispute goes and which decisions move it.
I already have a lawyer. Is there any point?+
Possibly more than if you did not. Several of the five apply to a matter already under way, particularly the fee question and the one about how the route was chosen.
Why would a law firm publish what litigation really costs?+
Because a client who understands the cost structure makes better decisions and is easier to advise. We would rather have that conversation at the start than at the third invoice.
Nico Lee
Founder and Managing Director
Nico is the founder and managing director of Triangle Legal LLC, an experienced Singapore lawyer with extensive expertise in civil litigation and corporate and commercial advisory. He is trusted to provide strategic legal advice to businesses and individuals alike, helping to protect business growth and value. He has advised and represented a diverse clientele, including multinational corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, high-net-worth individuals and state entities, in both corporate advisory and dispute resolution capacities.
Selected matters
Assisted a multinational corporation in successfully obtaining a worldwide Mareva injunction from the Singapore High Court.
Assisted in resisting a judicial management application for a company with debts in excess of US$50 million.
Assisted in successfully defending a defendant in a claim by the liquidators of an island development project in Indonesia, in excess of S$50 million.
Assisted in successfully defending the defendant in Writers Studio Pte Ltd v Chin Kwok Yung [2022] SGHC 205.
Assisted in Center for Competency-Based Learning and Development Pte Ltd v SkillsFuture Singapore Agency [2024] SGHC 121.
Featured in: Channel News Asia, The Straits Times, and the Singapore Academy of Law.
Sean Lee
Director
Sean is a Singapore-qualified lawyer with extensive experience in corporate advisory and dispute resolution. Called to the Bar in 2017, he has developed a multifaceted practice spanning commercial litigation, corporate transactions and regulatory compliance, and has appeared before all levels of the Singapore Courts. He also brings in-house experience from several technology companies, most recently a C-level role at a joint venture between two leading telecommunications providers in Singapore.
Selected matters
Acted as lead counsel in a nine-figure debt recovery action for a non-bank financial institution against multiple international debtors.
Successfully defended GrabTaxi in 3 Corporate Services v GrabTaxi Holdings Pte Ltd [2020] SGHC 17, a novel case that established public policy objections against cybersquatting.
Acted for a minority shareholder in Abhilash s/o Kunchian Krishnan v Yeo Hock Huat [2018] SGHC 107, and instructed Mr Davinder Singh SC and his team on the subsequent appeal in [2019] SGCA 14.
Advised a local hospitality company on one of Singapore's largest data breach cases, resulting in a fine significantly lower than comparable breaches.
Led negotiations on a nine-figure turnkey infrastructure and SaaS agreement with a multinational telecommunications corporation.
Joyce Soh
Associate
Joyce graduated with a Bachelor of Social Sciences in Sociology (Honours) from the National University of Singapore, with a special interest in criminal and family issues. She then joined the Central Narcotics Bureau of Singapore, where she worked on drug trafficking cases and analysed drug trends in Singapore and the region. She went on to a Juris Doctor in Law (Honours) from the Singapore University of Social Sciences, trained at a local firm across criminal, family and civil matters, and was admitted as an Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore in 2025.
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