While the number of lawyers in Singapore has grown, the number of small law firms has shrunk.
According to the 2009 annual report by the Law Society of Singapore, the number of lawyers in Singapore has grown by 6% since last year – from 3,490 to 3,697 lawyers. However, the number of smaller-sized firms employing five or less lawyers has shrunk: there were 711 firms in 2005, but this has now dropped around 3% to 685.
Tan Cheng Han, the Dean of Law at the National University of Singapore, said the decline of smaller firms is because law firms are consolidating. “Small firms are coming together to pool resources,” he said.
The figures may also demonstrate the effectiveness of recent government measures such as liberalising the legal industry and simplifying the admission process for foreign lawyers.
Tan said that liberalisation is more likely to have influenced growth, rather than the new qualification measures.“At the moment I think the liberalisation effort has been the greater contributor to the numbers, as the fuller impact of the education measures will be felt only in the next one to two years,” Tan said. “For example, there are now around 250 people expected to take the Part A examination in November this year and [the] first batch of law students will only graduate in 2011.”
WongPartnership’s managing partner Dilhan Pillay Sandrasegara said that it is unlikely that liberalisation played a significant part in the increase in lawyer numbers. “The recent growth could be attributed to a number of factors, one being fewer opportunities for younger lawyers to engage in legal practice in London, the US and other parts of Asia,” Sandrasegara said. “In time, as a result of the recently introduced measures, we’ll see more lawyers entering the profession each year.”
He added that having more lawyers would mean a more competitive local industry. “To the extent that the Singapore economy and the regional economies are buoyant, [growth in lawyer numbers] would be beneficial to the larger Singapore law firms and the foreign law firms who compete for good talent from the same pool.”
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