CJ announces committee to tackle lawyer oversupply situation
A lawyer makes his way to a court in Singapore. Photo: Channel NewsAsia
SINGAPORE — The ways in which law firms offer training contracts to fresh law graduates, make decisions to retain them and later nurture them will be reviewed by a committee over the next 12 to 18 months, announced Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon at the Mass Call last Friday (Aug 26).
Given the intense competition for places amid an oversupply of law graduates, he floated an idea to retain these “budding legal talent” rather than lose them to other industries: Keep them as paralegals first, so they can further develop their practical legal skills.
Young entrants, CJ Menon noted, face two main pressure points: Securing a training contract and having a “fair shot” at being retained at law firms.
“It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that these are the critical moments where you find your futures hanging in the balance,” he added.
Summing up the rather “unappealing” picture for young lawyers, he said: “In a saturated legal market, he faces a tough battle to get into and then be retained by a firm; in the firm, he has to adjust uncomfortably to the presence of new, smarter machines that may expose his limited abilities and knowledge and may even do a better job despite never having been to law school; and in ten years’ time, he reaches the point, like so many of his peers, where he says enough is enough and is ready to pack it in.”
The problem of oversupply is not new. Two years ago, Law Minister K Shanmugam had warned of a “lawyer glut” due to the climbing numbers going overseas to read law. Nearly 650 graduates competed for some 490 training contracts in 2014. The gap narrowed last year, with around the same number of graduates vying for 550 training contracts.
This year, 509 new lawyers were admitted to the Bar, a shade lower than the record 535 last year. In comparison, the figure rarely crept above 250 between 2006 and 2011.
Already, seven of the 18 United Kingdom law schools recognised for admission to the Singapore Bar were dropped starting from this year’s intake.
Despite measures to tackle the oversupply, the economy is also facing slower growth, noted CJ Menon. “Inshort, we should be prepared that the situation for fresh graduates and job-seekers is likely to remain difficult before it gets better,” he added.
To alleviate the situation, he has set up a 14-member Committee for the Professional Training of Lawyers, led by Justice Quentin Loh, to “undertake a root and branch review of the entire training contract regime in Singapore”. They will study current practices on how training contracts are applied for, offered and secured, for instance.
They will also look into the possibility of having firms publish their retention criteria, retention rates and other relevant data such as their commitment to pro bono work for a higher degree of consistency and transparency in the application and retention process.
Alternative structures for those who were not retained would be explored, such as keeping them as paralegals in the firm as the “first step in the learning curve towards admission to full professional status at a future time”, said CJ Menon.
Noting that this is not a new idea, CJ Menon said the UK and Australia have been adjusting to their oversupply situation by creating more room for graduates within their paralegal pool.
Speaking at the ceremony to admit advocates and solicitors of the Supreme Court, CJ Menon also spoke about two other trends in the sector. The emergence of new technologies which could tighten the squeeze on jobs and the “hollowing out” of mid-career lawyers who burn out and leave the profession.
Statistics show that mid-tier lawyers with seven to 12 years’ experience consistently make up about 10 per cent or less of the entire profession over the last five years.
Concerned that young lawyers are lured by financial rewards and their professional development comes at the expense of the firms’ pursuit of profits, he said: “The purity of that experience is tainted when money is fixed at the back of one’s mind.”
In calling for law firms to recalibrate their priorities to become “educational institutions with a duty to train” their young lawyers, he said the committee will also study how to improve the quality of supervised training, such as the possibility of putting in place a structured training programme and listing what is expected of the supervising solicitors and the supervision they provide.
Returning to his point about young lawyers’ motivations for pursuing a legal career, CJ Menon urged them to adopt the late President S R Nathan as their personal role model and be inspired by his “universal qualities of courage, devotion to duty, humility and selfless sacrifice”. The Republic’s sixth president died on Aug 22 at age 92.
He added: “Law is not the only choice for those who have managed to secure a “fistful of ‘A’s”, as one interviewee put it to us… If it is the lure of financial rewards that draws you, you should look at other options or be prepared for disappointment.”
