In Chan Kah Lon & Anor v Chin Jia Yee & Ors, the Plaintiffs sought to amend their statement of claim to, among others, bring in a firm and its two partners on the grounds of conspiracy. The conspiracy was on the basis that the law firm had tampered with a letter whereby the letter, though scanned, had a date which could be selected through a PDF reader.
Although the judgment did not state how the Plaintiffs obtained the letter, it records the Plaintiffs’ contention that the letter was generated, exhibited and filed by the law firm.
The Plaintiffs, however, did not bring in any expert evidence to show any tampering. In dismissing the Plaintiffs’ application, Justice Atan Mustaffa held the “court observed technical demonstrations regarding PDF selectability. D1, D3 and D4 successfully demonstrated that documents downloaded from the e-filing system commonly exhibit characteristics where some parts can be highlighted whilst others cannot, depending on whether they are scanned images or converted text. This is a common feature of PDF documents that combine scanned pages with converted Word documents. The observable characteristics the Plaintiffs point to can be explained by normal document processing methods used in legal practice.”
Essentially, the Plaintiffs’ reliance on this grounds fell as they failed to bring in expert evidence to support their claim.
An earlier version of this case summary was published by Foong Cheng Leong on LinkedIn.
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