A Practice Built on the Discipline of Legal Work Done Properly

Property transactions in Sarawak are governed by the Sarawak Land Code, a distinct piece of legislation that operates alongside the National Land Code applicable in Peninsular Malaysia. Practitioners who work across both regimes require familiarity with state-specific procedures — the consent requirements for dealing with native customary land, the particular lodgement processes at the relevant land registries in Kuching, Sibu, and Miri, and the forms of title peculiar to the Brooke-era surveys that still appear in older conveyances. Saksama Legal has developed this familiarity over more than a decade of regular instruction.

Will drafting and probate work, similarly, requires attention to the personal law applicable to the testator and to the beneficiaries. In Malaysia, the applicable rules on intestacy and on formal validity vary depending on the religion and community of the deceased. The firm's practice in this area is shaped by experience with the range of circumstances that presents in Kuching's population, where Chinese customary practices, Islamic succession law, and general civil probate procedure each arise in the course of a month's instruction.

The firm's founding partners made a deliberate choice to concentrate the practice in a small number of areas rather than offer the breadth that larger firms maintain. The consequence of that choice is that practitioners who attend to a matter in this office have done similar work many times before and are not learning the relevant procedure at the client's expense.