Building a world-class law school

By Alvin Lee

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – In April 2022, Singapore Management University’s (SMU) Yong Pung How School of Law (YPHSL) broke into the list of QS World University Rankings’ Top 100 law schools. Its ranking of 95 marked a steady climb from 2018 when it was last classified as 151-200, and 101-150 in the next three years.

“Our ambition is to be among the top 50 law schools in the world, and among the top 5 in Asia,” says Professor Lee Pey Woan, SMU’s recently appointed Dean of YPHSL. “These are realistic ambitions we can achieve, hopefully in five to ten years.”

The Dean told the Office of Research & Tech Transfer that the Law School has three focus areas: Dispute Resolution; Transnational Commercial Law; and Technology. Based on factors such as available talent pool, global trends, and serving the needs of the wider community, these focus areas were identified to maximise the capabilities of YPHSL’s relatively small size.

Training, re-training, and retaining lawyers

The three focus areas speak to Singapore’s position as a business hub, which requires extensive, yet broad, legal expertise. They also underline the challenges facing the legal profession and law schools.

“Our lawyers are qualified by an undergraduate degree, which means most of us do not have in-depth expertise in another area. For lawyers, that is increasingly a handicap,” observes Professor Lee, referring to complex problems that require deep knowledge of law, finance, technology, and other specialised field.

“If lawyers do not have the technical knowledge, it’s sometimes difficult for them to come to grips with the problems that need to be resolved. Even when you engage experts you need to know enough to engage them meaningfully. Increasingly, both lawyers in practice and in-house lawyers are telling us, ‘The problems are so complex, and consist of so many layers including technology and technical information, that we need people with deep understanding in these areas. That is a major challenge.”

Professor Lee points to SMU’s emphasis on inter-disciplinary training and continued learning as key to YPHSL graduates’ ability to cope in the modern legal profession, but she concedes law graduates are not the finished product. She says, “The first step is to help them develop a mindset to appreciate that this is really the start of their training, and not the end of it.”

She also points to the past when lawyers started out as apprentices instead of going to law school, hence the term ‘pupillage’. This route to being a lawyer is still available in places such as the UK, and illustrates the value and perhaps necessity of hands-on experience.

This also brings up the perennial issue of high attrition rates among young lawyers. A record 538 quit the profession in 2021, some 30 percent more than a year ago. Most of those quitting had been in practice for less than five years, making it difficult for law firms to justify the time and effort to train them. Many cite the long hours they had to work, making sleep a prime concern and additional training a virtual impossibility.

“Law firms tell me, ‘If we have 10 files, as a lawyer I have to read 10 files. I can’t just read files 1, 3, 5, and 7 – there’s intrinsically that degree of complexity that requires sustained, intense hard work,” Professor Lee explains. “I hope the profession can be more flexible in their work arrangements. Could law firms introduce a sabbatical system where, after four or five years, a lawyer could take half a year out?”

“That half a year allows the lawyer to take up some courses, or rest. Can law firms have flexible work arrangements that allow people who are starting families to work part-time – some already do – and then come back full-time after a while? Can law firms allow people to take a year out via no-pay leave? Law firms need to look at different ways to accommodate young people’s aspirations for a sustainable work-life balance.”

She adds: “I think maybe some young people are unrealistic in thinking of doing a high-paying job that doesn’t require intense work. On the other hand, I also think their aspirations of work-life balance aren’t completely unreasonable. If they want enough time to invest in their family in raising children, which requires a lot of effort and time, then law firms need to think about addressing that.”

Updating the law

Outside of her administrative duties as the Law Dean, Professor Lee focuses on researching company law, which she identifies as “one of the key strategies of the government’s shaping of our environment to help attract investment”.

“Every few years, the Companies Act is quite significantly revamped. Currently, the authorities are working on another version to upgrade our law,” says the Dean. “The thread of ‘How do we make our laws friendlier to businesses?’ is usually about ‘How do we cut down the processes? How do we streamline them? What is outdated and no longer needed? How do we reduce costs? How do we make it cheaper for businesses to comply?’ A lot of these costs are unnecessary.

“With the advent of tech, a lot of things have become obsolete. The Companies Act used to require the delivery of documents to the office, which is of course outdated. The Companies Act is still talking about meetings in person and quorum, we still have that kind of language. We’ve had to comb through it and say, ‘Look, ‘meeting’ means you can see and hear each other, that’s all. It can be done through a virtual medium.’ There are all these changes.”

She adds: “The more technical changes involve structures. In the financial world, there’s no lack of creativity when it comes to parcelling out pockets of money for investment purposes, and organising them in different ways. Even basic ideas like share capital, we think that we know what that is, but companies are introducing new ways of doing things, of ringfencing blocks of money or assets for investment or accounting purposes.

“We introduce these changes [to the law] to make them legal, to assure investors or people bringing in money here that there are all these flexible ways of managing money. The more flexibility there is, the more attractive we are to businesses with different demands and requirements. Our laws want to facilitate that. That’s what’s driving these periodic changes to the Companies Act.”

The human touch

Professor Lee credits her interest in company law to a university lecturer who taught the subject especially well during her university days. She had thought, “If I could one day be like her, that would be a good outcome!”

“When I graduated and joined my employer as an in-house lawyer – they gave me a scholarship – and I was exposed to the daily operations of a business. I learnt company law not in school but on the job. I learnt by talking to my boss, talking to accountants, by working through deals. By working through it and seeing how dynamic company law is, the subject came to life.”

While company law is often thought of in term of businesses or money, the Dean views her work and life in general in terms of the people she meets along the way.

“I would say that what animates me in this job is always the people – relationships matter a lot to me,” she muses. “I’m an introvert, like most academics, but I would regard myself as a warm person. When I’m working with people and we have a good relationship, I always feel that is very rewarding.

“When I see good relationships emerging from work, I always feel, ‘That’s why I would like to do this.’ Whether it’s a relationship with a student or my colleagues or external stakeholders, many of whom have been so supportive I have come to see as friends, that’s the intangible reward of the job.”