Cheryl Ng

Cheryl Ng is the Managing Director of Esplanade Law LLC. She is an Advocate & Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore (2013), a Solicitor of England and Wales (2022) and a Certified Fraud Examiner (2024). She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (2025) and the Singapore Institute of Arbitrators (2025). Cheryl is also an accredited mediator with Sage Mediation and a level 1 mediator with the Singapore International Mediation Institute. She graduated in law with honours from the Singapore Management University in 2012.

Cheryl has deep experience representing clients who have to sue or be sued on poor or non-existent policies and contracts. With over a decade’s experience in litigation, she has seen the impact of poorly drafted contracts and a lack of procedures once a dispute reaches court. She strongly believes that the best way to avoid litigation or a regulatory investigation is to have proper policies and documents that discourage them in the first place.

That view comes from the courtroom. Disputes are rarely decided on what people remember; they are decided on what was written down at the time. A handbook that contradicts the employment contract, a dismissal with no record of an inquiry, or a conflict of interest that was never declared can decide a case before the merits are even argued. A clear policy that was actually followed does the opposite: it often persuades the other side not to start proceedings at all. Cheryl drafts every clause as she would want to rely on it in a hearing, and designs every procedure so that her client can later prove it was followed.

Her civil and regulatory practice covers commercial litigation and arbitration, employment issues, tax disputes, and investigations by CAD, IRAS, MAS and SGX. As an arbitrator and mediator, she also sees disputes from the side of the decision-maker, which informs how she drafts dispute resolution clauses and settlement terms.

Cheryl was one of the pioneering Public Defenders at the Ministry of Law’s Public Defender’s Office, where, as Senior Assistant Director, she helped set up the office’s systems and processes, acted as lead counsel and trained junior Public Defenders. She has appeared as lead counsel in trials, appeals and sentencing hearings in the State Courts, the High Court and the Court of Appeal. That experience shapes how she runs internal investigations: she knows how the police, CPIB and prosecutors read an investigation file, because she has spent years reading them from the defence side.

She has done pro bono work under the Legal Assistance Scheme for Capital Offences and the Criminal Legal Aid Scheme (2014 – 2022), and served as co-vice-chairperson of the Law Society’s Criminal Practice Committee (2020 – 2022). She wrote the annotation of the Probation of Offenders Act for LexisNexis Annotated Statutes of Singapore (2022). She works in English and Mandarin.