Singapore an attractive market for lawyers
28 August 2010
SINGAPORE : Law Minister K Shanmugam has said Singapore can successfully grow the legal services beyond the demands of the limited domestic market.
He said it can achieve this by serving clients throughout the region, and even in the world.
Speaking at the Singapore Legal Forum organised by the UK-Singapore Law Students Society, the Law Minister gave an upbeat assessment of the industry, highlighting its resilience and potential for continued growth.
Mr Shanmugam said the legal sector outperformed the overall economy, posting modest growth in real terms of about 4.3 per cent even during the trough of the recession in 2009, when the economy shrunk by two per cent.
In nominal terms, the value add of the industry has increased by over 50 per cent in the last five years, and currently represents about 0.6 per cent of GDP.
Mr Shanmugam, who is also Second Home Affairs Minister, emphasised that the job market for lawyers in Singapore continues to be attractive. In fact, even during the recession years, the legal sector in Singapore performed quite well. And Singapore has been branching out into many areas of emphasis such as international arbitration.
The Law Minister said: "Singapore has been consistently ranked now for some time as a one of the top centres, if not the top centre, for international arbitration. And for a variety of reasons (such as) its natural advantages, its rule of law, location and a good judicial system.
"So arbitration is growing very strongly; people are holding arbitrations here when they have nothing to do with Singapore, because we have a very open system, and any lawyer from any part of the world can come and act as counsel in an arbitration, and local lawyers also see an increased amount of work in arbitration.
"Our liberalisation of the legal industry is part of a deliberate effort by the government to develop Singapore's financial and legal services in tandem, and to position Singapore as an integrated hub for these mutually-complementary services."
To support this growth, lawyers will have to stay updated with developments in both industry and in the law.
So from next year, the Singapore Institute of Legal Education will administer the compulsory continuing professional development scheme.
Mr Shanmugam said: "After you graduate as a lawyer and you start practising, there are continuing developments in the law which are necessary for every lawyer to keep up with. And in the past, we had very much left it to individual lawyers to use their own initiative to keep up.
"We are now moving towards a system, which is the case in other jurisdictions, where we will focus on having an organised system for continuing legal education, where people will come and hone their skills in specific areas and keep up-to-date with legal developments.
"It does not mean that lawyers have not kept up to date. But if you provide a framework and you provide a means by which top people in any field can come and share their experiences, it can benefit the entire profession."
The Law Minister also had a word of caution for those who chose to run down Singapore's legal system.
He said: "You get people running down every system; you take any country in the world, you get people running it down. The question for us is how is the economy doing, how is our legal system ranked internationally by reputable people like the World Bank.
"On all those measures, we do very well. But we always have to look at ways we can improve and make it more efficient and make it a system which delivers justice for the man in the street, as well as a strong sound system that international investors can trust and rely upon. And on all those counts, the record has been very positive and we must continue to make it so."
Source: S Ramesh, channelnewasia.com
