Singapore lawyers need to boost expertise: Lee Sr

SINGAPORE lawyers, long sheltered by a protective environment, need to upgrade their expertise to meet the demands of a growing international financial center, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew said.

Lee, a lawyer himself, said the entry of more foreign lawyers into Singapore was inevitable to boosting talent in the island-state's legal industry and he expressed hope that not too many Singaporeans would go into law.

"A major international financial center needs to have high quality and competitive legal services," he told delegates to a law conference here late today.

While there are lawyers here experienced in complex corporate and financial transactions, there is a dearth of them in vital areas such as infrastructure project financing or patents, he said.

"Our law firms however have grown up in a protective domestic environment. Foreign firms have been prohibited from practising Singapore law," thus local firms had "little incentive to expand into more challenging areas," he added.

Singapore has 800 local law firms, nearly half of which are sole proprietorships, with only seven firms having a stable of more than 50 lawyers, he said, adding that some 60 international law firms operating here dominate the field of international finance.

"At the end of the day the large part of the expertise that we must draw into Singapore will be foreign ... so why not invite them in and we learn from them," he said.

Asked by a delegate if he expected the number of law firms to consolidate in years ahead, he said he hoped most future top notch graduates would not enter law.

"Well, do you want them all in the law? That will be a disaster. We'll be so entangled with each other that we will never get productivity going. There'll be no revenue," he said.

He hoped only 10 to 14 graduates will go into the legal profession each year "and not more."

"We have to run a country and the country needs talent in many, many fields and I don't rate the law as crucial or vital. I think first we've got to get good ministers, or you're going to get bad governance and with that everything else disappears," Lee said.