There's absolutely no reason why law should be one of the higher paid graduate starting salaries here, when it is absolutely not the case in other major common law jurisdictions like the US, the UK or Hong Kong. I consider the last 10-12 years an anomaly. People forget that Singapore fresh grad lawyers were also way underpaid pre-2008-09.

Professional services are not a scalable business, there's a limit to the market rates that can be charged, and its strange to think that clients should be subsidizing junior lawyers for their work.

Ultimately, legal services are dependent on the maturity of the country's financial sector (which creates corporate work and other sector adjacent legal work). If you're practising in a major financial centre, you can command high billing rates and consequently Cravath type salaries (USD 190K in NY, London etc). But what is the proportion of US and UK lawyers actually working in BigLaw?

Our legal salaries are an order of magnitude lower than major financial cities, just as how, say, legal salaries in Kuala Lumpur are an order of magnitude lower than Singapore. Singapore is simply not as world class a financial centre as it thinks it is. Look at the moribund SGX.

Obsessing over starting salaries is a wholly lopsided approach to a legal career.

As a lawyer, your eventual earning power is tied to your ability to command fees based on your skill, so you're deferring an early payout for the chance to build up those skills and essentially be a small business owner (i.e. your own individual legal practice) later on in your career.

If earning a high salary at the start is a priority, then join finance or a tech firm.