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Final Report by the Ethics and Professional Standards Committee
The Ethics and Professional Standards Committee (the Committee) has published its Final Report on 13 January 2025. As announced at the Opening of the Legal Year 2025, the Honourable the Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon has accepted the Committee’s recommendations for implementation in consultation with the profession and stakeholders. This follows the Interim Report delivered on 15 December 2023 which presented 13 recommendations which had earlier been accepted by Chief Justice Menon.
The Final Report sets out the work done in implementation and augments the earlier approach with eight new recommendations. These seek to leverage the strength of the profession’s institutions in the three key areas of “ethos”, “learning”, and the “profession”. The Committee’s recommendations are highlighted below:
- Recommendation 1: The core values of the legal profession – identified in the Interim Report as Integrity, Professionalism, and Justice – should be widely communicated in order to: attract suitable candidates to the profession; unify the profession; and sustain its sense of purpose.
- Recommendation 2: To transmit and entrench the core values of the legal profession as community narratives, it is important to build collegiality and common aspiration. Celebrating community rituals and good role models provide visual and vivid representations of values and help to foster fraternity and commonality within the profession.
- Recommendation 3: The core values of the legal profession are to be articulated in various forms to build shared vision – such as the pledge for law students, the revised declaration for advocates and solicitors applying for admission, and the creed for the profession, which serve to explain the core values in a more detailed way and to build consensus on, and deepen understanding of, these values.
- Recommendation 4: To sustain long-term behavioural change by building habits and practices premised on aspirational standards, codes and reference guides relating to ethics and professional standards have been developed for specific practice areas, and further codes or reference guides have been proposed.
- Recommendation 5: The local universities should consider how to select students who will be committed to the ethical practice of law, and to inculcate in law students the unique ethical duties and obligations incumbent upon members of the legal profession.
- Recommendation 6: To inculcate the same values in the ethical consciousness of law graduates of overseas universities who seek to practise in Singapore, the ethics-related content from the law schools, where suitable, will be made available through the Singapore Institute of Legal Education (SILE) as an online ethics course to be completed by graduates from overseas universities.
- Recommendation 7: To ensure that professional training at each stage of the ethics education continuum builds on the previous stages, the SILE will review the content relating to ethics and professional standards taught as part of the preparatory course leading to Part B of the Singapore Bar Examinations.
- Recommendation 8: To promote career-long education and the continuous instillation of values throughout one’s professional life, ethics and professional standards should be a mandatory 3-point component (Mandatory Component) of the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) scheme.
- Recommendation 9: To contextualise ethical issues faced in the various specialist practice areas, ethics-related content should be incorporated into structured training and specialist programmes.
- Recommendation 10: To make resources on ethics and professional standards more accessible and to use new technologies to facilitate self-education, the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) launched a one stop self-education platform known as the “Ethics Repository” with Generative AI capabilities to be added.
- Recommendation 11: To ensure that practice trainees acquire the correct values, competencies and skills relating to ethics and professional standards, the Committee has given feedback to the SILE on the new Training Checklists for supervising solicitors, who are a primary source of mentorship for practice trainees.
- Recommendation 12: Intentional, lifelong and multi-layered mentoring is required especially in light of the changing legal landscape and the expectations of the younger generations. Mentorship should be strengthened within both general and specialist fields, and within the legal profession more generally.
- New Recommendation 13: To ensure effective mentorship, the Law Society of Singapore should complement its mentoring schemes by providing training for mentors on the content, structure and skills necessary for a productive mentor mentee relationship.
- Recommendation 14: To provide an avenue for lawyers to receive external guidance and mentorship on ethical issues, in a manner that is less formal than a request to the Advisory Committee of the Professional Conduct Council, the Law Society has implemented the Ethics Assist Helpline.
- New Recommendation 15: A peer support mechanism, named the Legal Practitioner Support Protocol, is recommended. In appropriate circumstances, this could rehabilitate or provide timely assistance to the affected legal practitioner.
- New Recommendation 16: To equip legal practitioners with practical knowledge on the sound management of law practices, the Law Society’s Legal Practice Management Course should expand its syllabus and be re-designed on a modular basis with modules of three CPD points each.
- New Recommendation 17: To ensure that junior lawyers receive effective mentorship at their workplaces, the Law Society should prepare a syllabus for a structured mentoring programme within law firms.
- New Recommendation 18: To facilitate ethics training within law firms, experienced lawyers of high professional standing should be encouraged to teach within their own firms. The SAL will curate relevant content on the latest legal developments relating to ethics and professional standards annually and disseminate them to law firms for their use.
- New Recommendation 19: The Law Society should make the position of the legal profession clear with a Policy on the prevention of workplace harassment and bullying.
- New Recommendation 20: To cultivate and maintain sustainable work practices and address the generation gaps between junior and senior lawyers on workplace culture and aspirations, the SAL should spearhead a sustained initiative to research the impact of this complex issue on the legal profession and develop a core set of workplace principles with a pilot group of law firms and legal departments.
- New Recommendation 21: The SAL’s Professional Affairs Committee should oversee the implementation of the Committee’s recommendations. A periodic review of the work done in implementation of the Committee’s recommendations and further recalibration could be undertaken as progress is made.
2025/01/13
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