Singapore's Legal Profession Faces Attrition Crisis

The law, in Singapore, has never been a quiet vocation.

Speaking at the National University of Singapore Law Faculty’s freshmen inauguration ceremony on Sunday, Coordinating Minister for National Security and Minister for Home Affairs K Shanmugam delivered a measured but pointed address to the profession’s next generation — one that acknowledged structural discomforts in the legal workplace while firmly situating them within the broader architecture of Singapore’s economic ambition. The occasion was a graduation threshold, but the subtext ran considerably deeper.

Shanmugam drew attention to a recent Law Society study on lawyer attrition, which surfaced a constellation of concerns familiar to anyone who has spent time in Singapore’s mid-tier or top-tier firms: punishing working hours, toxic workplace dynamics, derogatory treatment in court, existential anxiety over whether legal practice remains a sustainable career, and the encroaching shadow of artificial intelligence. These are not trivial grievances. They are the kind that quietly hollow out a profession even as its aggregate headcount continues to grow.

Yet the minister was careful not to let alarm outpace evidence. Official figures, he noted, show that attrition has remained broadly stable over the past decade. Citing data that Minister for Law Edwin Tong presented in Parliament in May, Shanmugam pointed out that approximately sixty per cent of lawyers remained in practice after five years between 2015 and 2024, with around forty per cent still active after a decade. Over the same period, the number of practising Singapore lawyers grew by twenty-six per cent, while in-house counsel expanded by roughly one-third, reaching approximately 4,800. Stability and growth, on their face, do not suggest a profession in crisis. But Shanmugam was precise enough to note that stable aggregate numbers do not preclude concentrated, serious problems beneath the surface.

“That does not mean there is no problem, and everything is okay,” he said — a sentence worth pausing on. It signals an institutional willingness to look harder, rather than to retreat behind favourable headline statistics. What he called for, in practical terms, was more detailed and objective data: how many lawyers actually carry such complaints, what law firms and the courts themselves have to say, and what the texture of the problem looks like when disaggregated properly. Size the problem, verify it, then deal with it. The sequence is methodical, and deliberately so.

The minister was equally direct about the structural realities awaiting those who choose to compete at the profession’s upper tier. A first-year qualified lawyer at a top local firm can expect to earn more than S$100,000 annually, with the very highest-paying firms offering between S$120,000 and S$140,000. Six to eight years in, the best performers reaching junior partnership may earn between S$200,000 and S$300,000 a year. These are not modest figures for a city-state of Singapore’s size, and Shanmugam was unambiguous about what they purchase: near-constant availability, intense pressure, and expectations calibrated against the standards of London and New York. “The pressure comes with the territory,” he said. “So it’s a choice.” For those who prefer a different pace, he acknowledged, there are firms that have made quality of life a deliberate part of their culture. The market, in other words, offers gradations — but only if aspiring lawyers enter it with clear eyes.

What made the address more than a standard induction speech was Shanmugam’s refusal to allow the demanding-profession argument to serve as institutional cover. He was explicit: nothing he said about the inherent pressures of legal practice excuses poor supervision, inadequate training, harassment, bullying, or unreasonable treatment. The distinction matters. There is a meaningful difference between a profession that is hard by nature and one that tolerates systemic mistreatment under the guise of professional rigour. Conflating the two has historically allowed bad workplace cultures to persist behind the shield of meritocratic mythology. Shanmugam’s framing, at least rhetorically, refuses that conflation.

He then turned to the structural foundations that have made Singapore’s legal industry what it is — and here the analysis sharpened into something closer to institutional pride tempered by strategic anxiety. Singapore fields roughly 6,400 practising lawyers, a figure that, set against a citizen population of around 600,000, yields a ratio of one lawyer per 570 citizens. South Korea, with approximately fifty million citizens and some 34,000 lawyers, produces a ratio of one per 1,470. Singapore also counts four law firms with more than 250 lawyers, compared with South Korea’s nine — a striking comparison given the vast disparity in population. The implication is clear: Singapore has punched far above its demographic weight, and it has done so through deliberate policy rather than natural scale.

Two pillars, Shanmugam argued, underpin this achievement. The first is macroeconomic policy that has generated sustained growth and made Singapore a destination for international business. The legal profession, he observed, thrives when businesses thrive — a structural dependency that makes the health of the broader economy a direct concern for every lawyer in practice. The second pillar is the rule of law, and here Shanmugam’s tone carried a note of genuine urgency. Singapore’s position as the world’s second most preferred seat for international arbitration after London did not happen by accident; it was the product of deliberate legislative reform and sustained government promotion over many years. But that position, he warned, cannot be taken for granted. Multinational corporations and foreign investors trust Singapore because they trust that contracts will be enforced, that courts will function credibly, and that their capital will not be subject to arbitrary interference. That trust is not a given — it is earned, continuously, through institutional consistency.

What Shanmugam left his audience with, implicitly, is a profession at a particular inflection point. Singapore’s legal sector is mature enough to attract serious international work, competitive enough to command salaries that benchmark against global financial centres, and large enough relative to its population to suggest genuine institutional depth. But it is also a profession grappling with questions about sustainability, culture, and whether the conditions it offers its practitioners are commensurate with what it demands of them. The minister’s call for better data is, in this light, more than administrative prudence. It is an acknowledgement that the profession’s long-term credibility — both as a career destination and as a pillar of Singapore’s rule-of-law reputation — depends on confronting those questions honestly, rather than managing them away with aggregate statistics.

The incoming law students who heard Shanmugam speak on Sunday are entering a profession that knows its own value, but is still working out what it owes the people who sustain it.