30 AprA note to the (anxious) young lawyer
By: Ervin Tan, SIDRA BRI Research Affiliate
To the young lawyers looking forward to be called to the bar: congratulations, and welcome.
You’ve earned a well-deserved break after years of law school, bar exams, and - hopefully for most of you - a period of training that seemed longer than it was.
Some of you may worry about retention or getting offered a position as an associate. Some of you may still be seeking a training contract.
Some of you may be wondering already whether you are in the right practice, or the right firm, or even the right profession.
Some of you who are luckier may also be wondering which of two or more good offers to select, or what your next big career moves should be.
Scope of Application of this Note
Whatever your situation I’d like offer you something practical which for some of you may translate into feelings of optimism – we could certainly use some cheer at this time.
What this will be is a list of some ways of thinking and some practical guidance which may help you, and may (hopefully) translate into a better experience for your future employers, clients, and opposing counsel too.
What this is not – and cannot be – is a guarantee of an outcome, or someone telling you it’s all going to be alright. On the contrary, you should be quite suspicious of gilded promises – just as your more savvy clients will also be suspicious of gilded pitches and over-optimistic guarantees. This takes us to theme #1: no guarantees.
Theme #1: embracing serendipity
There will be jobs in five years that do not exist today. When I left law school, third-party funding was not legal in Singapore.
Two years ago at Litigation Conference one of the most up-voted questions for the panel of third-party funders was ‘are you hiring any junior lawyers’.
Early last year headhunters who usually place candidates in firms were also placing candidates in third-party funders operating in Singapore.
So it will be in the next few years – and you who has recently left law school may well be the one starting a new industry which ends up hiring lawyers.
Embracing serendipity means a willingness to consider a job which the version of you five years ago may not have contemplated (possibly because it did not exist). It also means a willingness to consider a role which may not appear the most sexy, or a role you can humble brag about on LinkedIn at this time. So be it.
If you think it is a role where your ability satisfies the requirements, and where you think you are making some sort of tangible difference in someone’s life, and that makes you happy, then so be it – and see where that takes you.
Some years ago in one of my training contract interviews, I was asked one of those usual questions: why this Firm?
I pointed out to the two partners across the table that the answer to “Why this firm” was just going to me selling the firm back to them. They know as well as I do that each candidate applies to many firms, and we are all going to point out the virtues of each firm as if “global network” or “wide exposure for trainees across rotations” or “solid biscuits” were unique to any firm. (The biscuits are certainly better at some.)
And I concluded by saying to them that serendipity has brought us to the table, so the only question is ‘do we like what we see on the other side?’. (We did.)
Sometimes being fixated on the ‘right’ answer or on the ‘right’ path – which we only imagine to be the ‘right’ path – ends up making us lose sight of alternatives which can be a fun meander.
Take up an apprenticeship. Write a book (as several accomplished lawyers have done – Walter Woon, Philip Jeyaretnam, Daren Shiau – to name a few). Work in government. Work in a start-up. Work in any one of the many industries that lawyers serve – aviation, banking, construction, FMCGs, oil and gas, shipping, tech (many of which are – like law – suffering the effects of Covid-19 – but the point is to cast a wide net.) This bring us to:-
Theme #2: Be curious, and stay curious.
‘Commercial awareness’ is a phrase so overused that there are textbooks promising to make the reader commercially aware. Some of these are actually useful as a basic starting point, like Christopher Stoakes’ All you need to know about the City, Parts 1 and 2.
This is no substitute for having a general sense of curiosity, with bonus points if you have experience, expertise, or an interest in a field other than law.
It is not uncommon in England to meet lawyers who do not do law as a first degree.
I have had the pleasure of working alongside mid-career lawyers whose backgrounds in (for instance) (a) biomedical sciences made them excellent IP lawyers, or (b) journalism made them excellent inquisitors both of witnesses and of the truth.
Like Auenbrugger’s development of the medical procedure of auscultation inspired by the winemakers’ method of checking the amount of fluid in a closed container, your knowledge of and experience in fields outside of law can quite serendipitously come in useful if you can find a way to abstract that knowledge, and to find a suitable way to apply it.
More generally, you’d also be a bit more memorable – and for better or worse, if someone’s trying to think of a name under time pressure, the slightly more memorable name will come up first.
Separately, experience outside of the usual – i.e. interning at a law firm during your holidays – is also going to helpful, especially if this takes you out of a bubble that you have been living in.
When I leafed through CVs of interns, what leapt out at me (out of reams of similar profiles) is the candidate who has waited tables at a warung.
This is not a result of affirmative action misapplied – on the contrary, the legal profession is very much a service industry, and a candidate with experience in an even more difficult service industry is likely to be someone who will service clients well.
Some practical steers for those who have time on their hands: Harvard’s CS50 for lawyers, for instance, is available and free – and a junior lawyer who picks up some computational thinking should also become quite good at figuring out what a well-drafted ‘if-else’ penal statute or a well-drafted tiered dispute resolution clause / escalation clause looks like. ‘How would a machine botch this instruction’ is not far different from asking ‘how would my client’s counterparty shaft my client with this language’ – and how do I improve on this?
Theme #3: Life skills, usefulness and likeability.
Partner time is precious; economics therefore inevitably leads a senior lawyer wanting (even needing) to spend less time supervising the work of a junior. This is balanced against the desire not to call the Firm’s insurers.
Nobody expects a junior to not have questions for the senior lawyer you work for. But you can quite sensibly do things which reduce the amount of a senior lawyer’s time spent (a) instructing you and (b) reviewing your work. One way to do that is to be completely clear as to what the deliverable is – in what format, with what limits (especially page limits), and in which house style. Nobody likes getting a bolt-on piece of drafting that when stuck onto the body of the main text is out of sync enough that it looks like visual equivalent of an quartal chord.
Some of the best trainees have an almost clairvoyant ability of anticipating needs.
One useful way to think about how to anticipate needs is to think of the last time you travelled, except now imagine staffing that trip for yourself as a demanding supervisor. What did you forget to pack the last time? What could be optimised? What would you have done differently to make your life easier?
All of this has a very practical application if you as a trainee or a junior are being asked to pack for a week-long hearing – and you will be remembered for either anticipating needs, or forgetting something important at the hearing. Both are memorable; pray that it be the former.
Finally, if you’re going to be in the same place as other people for 10 or so hours a day, 5-6 days a week, it’s easy enough to develop symptoms of hyper co-presence – i.e. too much of the same people. So be likeable; be helpful; don’t be a stranger.
Theme #4: Know thyself.
This is especially for those asking whether you are in the right practice, or the right firm, or even the right profession. It’s also relevant to those agonizing over multiple offers, and wondering which one will optimise your life. Spoiler: it matters less than you think.
More importantly, ask yourself what it is you want to achieve.
If you want to make a lot of money in a very short time, then you’re in the wrong industry, because making a lot of money in a very short time can be better achieved by being a trader or a bulge-bracket investment banker.
Lawyers today can and do make good money, but it’s generally not a get-rich-quick type of scenario, certainly not like the profession was in the ‘80s when one compares legal revenue as a multiple of cost of living.
If you want more control over your own time, then consider a practice area which is a bit more predictable and does not require you to respond to requests (a) like closing a deal by Sunday midnight, or (b) involving cross-border matters which might span less convenient time zones.
If you want a lot of advocacy experience as a junior lawyer, then consider the public service or smaller firms, where junior lawyers will get more opportunities to speak in court, possibly even as lead counsel in a trial or an appeal.
If you want to mould the future of the next generation of lawyers, consider academia.
From Theme #1 and #2 above – exploring widely / dabbling is a useful way of finding out (a) what you like and (b) what you are good at; and equally important, finding out (a) what you do not like and (b) what you are relatively better at.
If you want to know how well you will fit in to the team, write to the partner or the associates in the team, and ask to meet for a coffee or lunch. A well-crafted email is rarely ignored entirely; a well-crafted email will at least get you an email response, if not a phone call. Bonus points if the associates actually have time to take you out to coffee or to lunch – I consider this a good sign. This leads us to Theme #5:-
#5: Ask.
The legal profession has no shortage of generous souls who are more than happy to answer questions that trainees or junior lawyers may have, and even if we do not have answers we may be able to provide a useful steer – sometimes by asking you even more questions, the sort that help you to Know Thyself.
I have been very fortunate to come across and be friends with many, many practitioners who are generous with their time and advice. We see this in lawyers who do pro bono work; lawyers who spend time on Law Society’s Council and its many sub-committees; lawyers who teach Part B courses after work; lawyers who open up their firms for the Part B open day; lawyers who have taken on more trainees then usual when called upon in these unusual times; lawyers who give generously to worthy causes such as the Yellow Ribbon project – you who have given with no expectation of reward epitomise all that is gracious and noble in the legal profession.
Those who give their time and advice do it because it is its own reward. It is the carrying on of the generosity of those who have come before us.
I can personally vouch that it is its own reward to guest-judge moots after work or on a weekend. There is a joy to watching the impressive advocacy skills of law students – no doubt the result of many hours of tutelage by those who decided, after law school, to go on and groom generations of quality lawyers.
As a law student and later a trainee, one of the practices I noticed was that no practising lawyer would ever take you out to lunch and go Dutch; the senior lawyer in the group always picked up the tab. And so one has imbibed this habit and pays it forward.
To that end, I will conclude with something practical – if you are a young lawyer and you have some anxieties about your present position or your future or your place in the universe, feel free to get in touch with your questions, and I will respond to you. I can’t promise any answers - but in responding I would give the best I could.
Postscript.
Please enjoy the wisdom of VK Rajah at NUS Faculty of Law’s commencement ceremony of 2017:
Mr Rajah noted that many young lawyers would want to emulate apparently successful lawyers and feel the need to assume some of their traits.
"A word of advice. Don't. Be yourselves. By all means, absorb all the professional lessons but do not blindly absorb all the personal attributes that you witness," he added.
"There are practising lawyers who have changed their identities and become uncaring in seeking to secure their clients' ends. They practise ostensibly within the letter of the law without observing its spirit."
On embracing competition, he said it would be sad "if lawyers still plead for protection from international competition" decades after Singapore started its first law school.
"I do not think that lawyers today have any right to try and deny clients access to the best legal minds available, Singaporean or international," said Mr Rajah, who said he would be returning shortly to private practice without elaborating.
On seeking a larger purpose, he said law firms and lawyers "should not be defined by just billing targets, profits and compensation".
"Unlike the hospitality business, the client is not always right. A good lawyer does not slavishly follow the client's instructions. Instead, he counsels the client to achieve balance," said Mr Rajah, who was from the 1982 batch that included Senior Counsel Davinder Singh and Judges of Appeal Andrew Phang and Steven Chong.
He also urged the graduates not to stay on longer in the legal profession than they have to if they are uninterested as "only those with passion will excel".
"Unhappy lawyers are not just unhappy persons but a lack of commitment can have adverse consequences for others. Find your passion by all means. Today, a law degree opens many doors," he added.