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Old 22-06-2021, 01:44 PM
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Well there’s definitely something wrong when legal salaries in other financial centres have increased substantially in the past 10 years, whereas Singapore’s local firms have remained stagnant. Are Singapore law firms losing relevance?
The underlying issue, as you've alluded to, is that Singapore law firms have likely not remained as profitable as firms in other jurisdictions.

Bear in mind that our legal industry is very underdeveloped and immature. You won't find reported stats on revenue figures for law firms.

In the US and UK, you have AmLaw200 and The Lawyer 200 rankings that track stats like revenue, profit per lawyer (PPL), profit per partner (PPP), profit per equity partner (PEP) Year on Year without fail. These have shown nothing but steady increases. If we can't even find these stats, you can forget about industry-wide info on salary scales, which must be gleaned anecdotally here.

I suspect that revenue growth of local Big 4 and midtier firms is very flat or only slightly increasing, but non-fee earner overheads are increasing a lot. To maintain the same level of partner drawings, the partners have resisted across-the-board raises in the salary scale.

Because this problem of low profitability of Singapore legal services is structural, the solution must also be structural. I.e., to allow for full liberalization of international firms to practice in all areas of SG law. That will force some unprofitable local firms to merge or close while giving more options to Singapore lawyers to work in international firms here.

We may not see NY or London level salary scales, but it at least cause an upward push on salaries for the largest firms here.
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