Donovan Cheah

⚒️ What do you do?

I head the employment and disputes practice of Donovan & Ho, the law firm I founded in 2014. 

Right now I’ve been focused on setting strategies and action plans for 2023. This has involved working with the rest of the team to identify areas of focus, allocate resources and develop plans to achieve our goals for next year. 

In addition to this, I’ve been occupied with having one-to-one meetings with our team members to give feedback on how they have been doing, and to work with them on their individual goals. On top of this we are still handling a full caseload of employment and disputes matters for our clients.

🏆 What is your proudest achievement?

Writing my book, “Navigating Employment Disputes in Malaysia”, and getting it published. I wrote this book during the height of the pandemic.

It was a challenging time to be working on such a big project, with so many distractions and disruptions to my usual routine. It’s a great feeling to accomplish something I have been working towards for a long time.

⌛ There are now 25 hours in a day! How do you spend your extra hour?

Catch up on some sleep!

🚀 If you weren't a lawyer, what would you do?

I think I would be a writer, a programmer, or a coder.  

Writing has always been a passion of mine, and I enjoy the process of creating and sharing ideas through the written word.  

I have also always been interested in technology, and have enjoyed learning about coding and programming over the years.

Little known fact:  
I taught myself website programming and crafted our firm's website (which now houses 400+ articles) from scratch using HTML. The website has evolved since then but I’m happy to say that its origins have been completely home grown.

😋 Your favourite food haunt (bonus points if it's off the beaten track!)

I don’t have a usual food haunt, but if I’m grabbing breakfast before work you can usually find me at Kenny Hills Bakers or Der Backmeister, a German bakery which serves up a mean meatloaf.