NUSWhispers – Confession #41911

#41887: like with lawyers elsewhere, for a legal graduate to become a lawyer, he/she must pass a bar exam. In Singapore the bar exam is administered by, and only by, Singapore Institute of Legal Education (SILE). Requirements for candidates of a bar examination are many, but include: c. have satisfactorily served the practice training period applicable to him; That, my friend, is a training contract. So, without a training contract, a law graduate can not even enter the bar exam. The complication here is this that requirement makes SILE, in effect, a monopoly in legal practice and a union for existing lawyers and union members. It does matter that there are hundreds of law firms when all lawyers need to be certified by SILE, and all candidates for certifications need to be employed for at least 6 months by a firm ran by a SILE member. There is a limit on the number of firms, and the number of trainee employed by such firm. The effect of this monopoly is it restricts the total number of new lawyers eligible to practice in Singapore every year, protects the job and earnings of existing lawyers, and drives up the cost of legal counselling for the rest of Singapore. And as expect by a union ran by lawyers, it is a "statutory body" aka: protected by the State with the full force of law enforcement and the court. I hope this explains a few things: why TCs are so important to law students, why the cost of hiring a lawyer is so expensive in Singapore, and why economically speaking, this is a terrible field. Existing lawyers and union officials (SILE's Board of Directors) have excellent income, I have no doubt; but there is simply no free-market, free-enterprise competition. There are intense competition of course, among the law graduates, but this is a competition within a monopoly. Full disclosure: I am not a lawyer, nor a law student, graduate, or even an aspiring one. I'm just a recently-converted part-time economics enthusiast.