SINGAPORE, 8 January 2024 — The Singapore Academy of Law (“SAL”) is rolling out a range of initiatives to support the training and professional development of lawyers and sharpen Singapore’s competitiveness as a hub for legal services. This is all the more urgent as infocomm technologies such as generative artificial intelligence permeate modern law practice.

At the Opening of Legal Year today, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, who is also President, SAL, highlighted the recommendations from a Working Group[1] to review the legal education and training regime to ensure that legal professionals are equipped to meet the demands of modern practice.

SAL will support these recommendations with the following:

National competency framework for legal profession

SAL will consult stakeholders to adapt and modify LIFTED[2] as the competency framework for the legal profession. The framework will also be aligned to SkillsFuture. It will set out recommended courses or programmes necessary for lawyers to develop the core competencies necessary at different stages of their career.

Junior Lawyers Professional Certification Programme (“JLP”)

From next year, SAL will introduce a voluntary Junior Lawyers Professional Certification Programme (“JLP”) aimed to equip young lawyers of less than five years PQE with practical skills in either disputes or corporate work, as well as in management and professional ethics.

Participants will be exposed to scenario-based learning, problem-solving skills, and simulation exercises, in addition to technical knowledge, to help them understand and deal with the range of legal and ethical issues that they may encounter in the course of their work.

SAL will establish a full-time faculty to ensure the quality and relevance of its training programmes, including the JLP.

Extra credit dollars to support lifelong learning

From 2024, more than 12,500 SAL members, including corporate counsel, legal and judicial service officers and practitioners, will receive an annual credit of $250, six times more than the current $35 per year. This increase signals SAL’s commitment to plough back membership fees directly to its members by giving them access to high quality products and services to support their lifelong learning needs. The credits can be used to register for workshops, conferences, structured training programmes such as the JLP, legal research services, such as e-books from Academy Publishing and, for in-house counsel to pay for a personal subscription to LawNet.

New content to service needs of corporate lawyers

SAL will be enhancing its efforts to serve the needs of corporate lawyers, who play a critical role in supporting Singapore’s vision to be a business and legal hub for the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. In the pipeline are upgrades to LawNet’s commercial precedents database, new practical guides on regulatory and compliance requirements in the region, and from 15 January 2024, standardised boilerplate clauses for Asian commercial contracts, and resources that map out the rules on cross‐border data transfers in select Asian jurisdictions.

Mr Yeong Zee Kin, Chief Executive of SAL, said, “SAL remains committed to investing in the learning and professional development of our members. Over the past year, more than 6,500 members attended at least one training programme from SAL. We hope that with the increased credits, even more will do so. We also hope our increased investment in our members’ development will spur law firms and other employers to do the same.”