This millennium ushers in an incredible time for the legal profession. Looking at your faces on this first day of the Practical Law Course, I can see the measure of the future of our profession.
Harking back to the days when you embarked on your first day in kindergarten, holding tightly to your Mum and/or Dad's hands, you have certainly come a long way. Although far more independent now, I hope you continue to face your new challenges in the law with the same enthusiasm and vigour, with which you undertook that first day in school, quite sometime ago.
As you embark on the next phase of your journey towards becoming 'qualified persons', quite apart from the immediate and understandable concerns you will have about passing examinations, I want you to be conscious always that law is real, and it touches lives.
The practice of the law is as worthy, diverse and complex as the world we live in, and each area of specialisation of practice is equally important and significant, because how you deal with each matter and its outcome will have a profound effect on the lives of the people it involves.
I also want to challenge you to adjust your mindset against the backdrop of what is happening in Singapore regionally and, indeed, globally in the legal arena, to have a clearer picture of where the legal profession is heading and where you will be going. To quote Michael Kirby: 'Now we see the challenges of our time through the world's eye'.
Dispelling Misgivings
First, let me dispel some misgivings you may have from recent media expositions
on the number of lawyers leaving practice, the pace of litigation demanded by
our courts and the apparent phenomenon of empty courtrooms.
As with any profession, there will be people who leave legal practice: (a) to advance their knowledge at a full-time institute of education; (b) to move to inhouse positions; and (c) many more recruited by the Legal Services Commission as mid-career judicial or legal officers. Thus, although numerically there may appear to be a drop in the number of lawyers remaining in the profession, many continue to serve the needs of the public with their legal expertise in other ways.
Of course, as with other professions, there is a season and time for everything, and stress at work, being overworked or possibly a combination of both factors and personal reasons, may well contribute to some practitioners leaving or taking time out.
The discipline of time and stress management is a skill that everyone must eventually come to terms with and apply in our lives.
Update and Upgrade
Remember that law is ever evolving, and its practice even more so. What used to
be part of legal practice is gradually shifting to paralegals and non-lawyers,
or down-loadable forms.
Conversely, new areas of legal services are developing and many opportunities are being thrown up as a result: many young lawyers today are thriving on the uncertainty in emerging areas of practice such as information technology and intellectual property. These new areas are paving the way for new entrants into the legal market to carve out their niches. No longer is inexperience a hindrance as distance becomes dead.
New ways of doing business through evolving legal business models such as limited liability corporations, formal law alliances, joint law ventures, group practices and multi-disciplinary practices will also bring about changes to the way you will practise law tomorrow.
The craft that we practise demands constant development and fine-tuning. We must accept that reading, writing, and continuously advancing our knowledge in the areas we advise and practise in takes time.
However, we have now ushered in an era where a lawyer will have the fullest flexibility to do research and conduct his cases with the advent of the 'virtual office'. A cadre of 'online lawyers' will develop - working from home or in virtual offices all over the world. Boundaries on maps as we know them will soon become blurred by advances in telecommunications and language translation technology. The practice of law will move beyond a time and space paradigm. Much information-sharing, legal research and client interaction will be done online. The human touch, however, must not be lost.
We are already progressing with consistent steps towards that time. Recently, the Law Society launched a knowledge-management initiative to provide our small law firms with access to an online research library of Commonwealth cases. Such facilities will allow our small law firms to do their case research anytime and anywhere so long as they have a computer and Internet access. The Law Society itself, has commenced an initiative to go 'paperless', by sending bulletins and relevant information to its members via e-mail.
Demands of Clients and Courts
There is a perception that clients and courts have increasing and unattainable
demands, but consider these developments as challenges to be met by a corpus of
elite practitioners of a profession that society absolutely cannot do without.
As stated earlier, what stands in danger of becoming extinct are areas of practice, not lawyers. We fulfil a role that only we can administer with skill and art.
However, lawyers and the court system are being challenged to become more service-oriented, despite being more and more technology-driven.
On the litigation front, our courts have already led the legal profession on a 'paperless' route.
It is vital that as you pay close heed to your classes on procedure both civil and criminal, you also equip yourself with the knowledge necessary to file papers and present arguments in an electronic environment. Attend the EFS class and your visits to the technology courts with a determination to absorb everything, as these will be the future tools of your trade.
Exploit the opportunity that attending the PLC now gives you to obtain a good grasp of procedure and basic advocacy skills for these form the armoury comprising the skill and art of our profession.
I am confident that the advocacy training, which for the first time will be conducted by the Law Society's Advocacy Committee, will encourage you by equipping you with some basic skills that you will use throughout your career, even if you decide that a career in litigation is not for you.
Law is a Worthy Cause
One aspect of practice, which I cannot emphasise enough, does not pay money.
Sometimes, it does not even pay in gratitude. But I encourage you, when you
qualify as a lawyer, to seriously consider giving up some of your time to
continue the fine tradition of doing pro bono work.
You will, in the course of the next few months, have the opportunity to attend on-the-job training at various locations. Whether it is free legal counselling at a Community Centre or an attachment at the Criminal Legal Aid Scheme ('CLAS') office, strive to appreciate the value such services are to the disadvantaged individuals who come for help.
As lawyers, we have a special opportunity to contribute to society our professional training which teaches us to solve problems. When our clients, whether they are corporate entities or the man-in-the street come to us, they expect us to provide them with solutions, for the fee they pay us. But the next time a pro bono opportunity presents itself, welcome it not as an obligation, but a privilege, and it will make your life that much richer in spirit.
For me, what has sustained me all these years, has been the knowledge that I have been entrusted with a significant part of my clients' lives, as well as those whom I serve pro bono and I will do my very best for them.
A Change in Mindset
I implore you to enter this course with the right spirit. Ask all the questions
and clarify all those nagging doubts. Strive to adopt best practices from what
you have learned in the ethics and professional standards classes. Brush up your
drafting skills and perform your advocacy practices with the intention to make a
bid for those prestigious advocacy prizes.
Whilst going through the course, also allow yourself to identify your areas of interest, as adjunct to identifying what you would love to do is to identify those areas in which you are especially skilled. Some of us are naturally at ease with clients - others are more comfortable working away from human interaction, content with generating the work for the client at arm's length. Some enjoy negotiation, mediation and have an attitude of resolution. Others embrace adversarial work and enjoy the battle of the courtroom and the problem solving involved in complex litigation of transactional or jurisdictional issues.
Evaluate your area of expertise. Strengths vary widely in the profession and no one lawyer has prowess in all substantive areas - not even the Senior Counsel! Choose the niche that appears to be the best for meeting the 'do what you love' principle, but do not neglect developing a basic foundation in legal skills.
The global practice of law and the teaching of law is going to see massive changes. Adopt a flexible and adaptable mindset, to expect to continuously develop legal skills and knowledge, and take the PLC as your first step as a professional commencing life in our honourable profession.
Conclusion
It is good people that make a good system, and very rarely a good system that
makes good people. The future of our law practice in Singapore is in your hands.
The system of justice in Singapore depends on you for its excellence. Whether
you become corporate practitioners, litigators, state counsel, inhouse counsel,
legal officers or judicial officers, you are the beacons that will continue to
shine the path for others to follow and emulate.
I wish to conclude with an anecdote that I recounted to last year's PLC students who attended the first PLC Dinner.
In the late 1800s, there was a thriving ice industry in the Northeast. Companies would harvest blocks of ice from frozen lakes and ponds and sell them around the world.
These ice-harvesters, were however, in turn put out of business by companies that invented mechanical ice-makers. It was no longer necessary to cut and ship ice since companies could make it in any city during any season.
These ice-makers, were however, in turn put out of business by refrigerator companies. How much better to be able to make ice and create cold storage in individual homes than at a manufacturing plant.
One would have thought the ice-harvesters would see the advantages of ice-making and adopt this technology but they concentrated instead on the known: better saws, better storage. The ice-makers, too, would have been expected to develop the technology for refrigerators, but didn't.
The fact is that both couldn't embrace the unknown and jump their learning curve to the next curve.
When all is said and done, today's legal education can never totally prepare you to be lawyers in the next decade, let alone the next century.
Change is so rapid and profound we cannot exactly predict how the profession will evolve. It will ultimately be the capacity to respond to that change - and to contribute to servicing society's needs - that will distinguish the successful lawyer from the rest.
You must not just challenge the unknown, but embrace it. And not give up. Have a career design, followed by conscious career building, and the next step begins with this course.
On behalf of the Board of Legal Education, welcome to the Postgraduate Law Course for 2002.