Harry Elias Partnership has lost its managing partner of four years as well as four other partners in the space of just one week.
After a four year-tenure as managing partner, Latiff Ibrahim resigned from the firm on 29 January. Four other partners – Lynette Chew, Kelvin Aw (both who were only recently promoted to the partnership), Shanti Jaganathan and Shashi Nathan – also tendered their resignations.
According to the firm’s new managing partner, Philip Fong, the departures are due to differences of opinion over the firm’s structure and future plans. “Latiff's departure was largely due to the divergence of strategic direction of the firm, between Latiff and the majority of the incumbent partners, which arose primarily from a growing disagreement with his leadership,” said Fong in a statement.
Ibrahim joined Harry Elias in 1999 from KhattarWong and became sole managing partner in 2006. While he agreed that different management styles led him to leave Harry Elias, he said the issue is part of broader changes sweeping across Singapore’s legal market since the arrival of foreign law firms last year. The government’s measures to liberalise the legal market, coupled with its investments promoting Singapore as an international arbitration hub, has meant that smaller firms are facing intense competition from bigger and better resourced international firms for a share of the legal market, he stated.
“You can’t be a managing partner unless you’re prepared to drive a firm’s growth. I wanted to grow the firm by bringing in new partners, looking for merger or alliance opportunities, and that was what I was doing,” Ibrahim said. “In all of those decisions I consulted the partners, some did support [this] and some didn’t. As a managing partner I made some hard decisions and that’s where there was growing differences, because I was constantly consulting [the partners] in new opportunities.”
Ibrahim witnessed the shifting legal market when a delegation of managing partners went to London a few years back, as part of a governmental drive to lure home Singaporean lawyers. That was followed by the government’s QFLP scheme and the opening of the arbitration centre – Maxwell Chambers.
“It was clear to me that…one of the parties affected would be the medium-sized firms. These smaller firms would be competing with the bigger Singapore firms and the idea would be that they would poach talent from the medium-sized firms. So there were strategic management differences [with how] I wanted to grow the firm, but I couldn’t make headway,” he explained.
As well as looking to broaden the firm’s relationships with local firms in countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia, some of Ibrahim’s other efforts during his tenure as managing partner included internal promotions. “The last major decision I made as managing partner was the promotion of five junior partners to full partners in December last year,” he said.
Two of those he promoted, Lynette Chew and Kelvin Aw, resigned with Ibrahim. The firm has since elevated Francis Goh, Koh Tien Hua and Andy Lem to partnership. It also officially converted to a limited liability partnership on 2 February, which would distribute decision-making power across the firm, instead of one person. Ibrahim said he welcomed the decision to convert to an LLP model when it was made last year, having been twice postponed. Fong said that there was no direct relationship between Ibrahim’s resignation and the firm’s LLP conversion.
Ibrahim said he is currently looking into a number of opportunities going forward.
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