By MP for Aljunied GRC, Sylvia Lim
[Delivered in Parliament on 4 Nov 2014]
I declare my interest as a Singapore lawyer holding a practising certificate.
The Bill makes rather drastic changes in the way the legal profession is organized and regulated. While I am in general support of the Bill, I would like to seek clarifications on two areas.
First, I understand that the Law Society had in April expressed some concerns to MinLaw about the Bill. They observed that the Law Society’s self-regulatory role was being further eroded. For instance, the Director of Legal Services taking on a big role to register firms, and non-practitioners will also be involved in issuing practice directions and sitting on the Professional Conduct Council that oversees the relevant rules governing professional conduct matters. The Law Society had also indicated in its letter in April that it had insufficient time to provide feedback to the Ministry on the changes. How has the Ministry engaged the Law Society before this Bill was presented to Parliament, and how did the Ministry take the Law Society’s feedback into account?
My second concern is the new Section 36G, under which non-lawyers can be approved to own shares in law firms. Reservations about this were expressed by the Committee chaired by Mr Sundaresh Menon to Review the Regulatory Framework of the Singapore Legal Sector in its report in January 2014 (at para 88.2). The Committee noted that such alternative business structures risked consumer protection: lawyers might have competing duties to the Court and to shareholders; non-lawyer owners may have conflicts of interest; there are also concerns about client confidentiality, as different professions have different standards of duty, core values and ethics. The Law Society too expressed grave concerns that there may be abuse should non-lawyers be permitted to participate in law practices, as they “anticipate that such entities would inevitably be profit-driven which may result in higher legal costs for the public”. They expect that lawyers might be urged to maximise billing hours, resulting in unnecessary and protracted proceedings. They were also worried that conflicts of interest might arise if non-lawyer owners had ties with large corporations such as banks and real estate corporations which are profit-driven.
Earlier, the Minister mentioned some safeguards to ensure non-lawyer owners are subject to the same standards of the legal profession regarding ethics and confidentiality. I would like him to elaborate further on the safeguards e.g. are there any professions forbidden from being non-lawyer owners, and in particular, whether there are any added safeguards against excessive legal costs.