Lawyer Salary

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Is this the market situation now? Seems like the foreign uni oversupply has gotten quite serious. Maybe MinLaw should cut more unis from the Approved List. We don’t want people from questionable schools practising law

U are in law I guess and u do know that this is due to various factors :

(1) Singapore liberalized it’s legal sectors years ago and this mean opening it up to international firms. Such firms send their lawyers from overseas to Singapore, increasing the number of lawyers in the field.
(2) A lot of work in corporate is cross border today. Our Sg lawyers don’t have the training
and grounding in say Indonesian law (if you do a lot of project financing you’ll know what I mean).
(3) The core Sg law work is drying up. Technology advancement means u really need lesser lawyers around.
(4) With the exception of litigation, most of the law work do not have barrier to entries. Sg firms can easy employ lawyers from India, China (which are much cheaper and better)
(5) The accredited list of foreign unis is just one small issue. The fact they didn’t do anything about Australia unis show that such a move is symbolic to some extent.
(6) The introduction of third law school (focus on crim and fam) will increase competition among 2:2 grads from NUS and SMU bcos these individuals will be vying for the 1-5 man show or the Chinatown law firms.

Viewed in another lens, people should thank top law graduates for choosing to go HK or other jurisdictions to work in international firms. They leaving the Sg market for other markets means they reduce the level of competition within the Singapore legal market.

When top law graduates leave the traditional legal routes, and do challenging stuff like cross border work (China, India and Hong Kong), they are giving the lower ranked law graduates a better chance of securing jobs within the Singapore legal market.

They choosing to go to another market to work means giving up their comfort zones and embarking on a very challenging career because the competition in international legal markets is 2-3x more challenging than within the Singapore legal market.

Altogether now, lets thank these top graduates for leaving SG....one two three..THANK YOU!

Heard MOHH pays doctors starting salary of $7.5k. Is it true?

Same as BM?

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Heard MOHH pays doctors starting salary of $7.5k. Is it true?

Same as BM?

No way. House officers have to endure a salary of 3k for 1 year before their salary increase to 5k+ after they become a medical officer.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

No way. House officers have to endure a salary of 3k for 1 year before their salary increase to 5k+ after they become a medical officer.

I’m not talking about HO. If HO then our law trainees are also getting 1.5k to 2k during Teng. I’m talking about newly qualified doctors and whether increment is $1k every year (like the law big fours).

I heard doctors w 3 years exp in MOHH getting paid $10.5k

Originally Posted by Unregistered

U are in law I guess and u do know that this is due to various factors :

(1) Singapore liberalized it’s legal sectors years ago and this mean opening it up to international firms. Such firms send their lawyers from overseas to Singapore, increasing the number of lawyers in the field.
(2) A lot of work in corporate is cross border today. Our Sg lawyers don’t have the training
and grounding in say Indonesian law (if you do a lot of project financing you’ll know what I mean).
(3) The core Sg law work is drying up. Technology advancement means u really need lesser lawyers around.
(4) With the exception of litigation, most of the law work do not have barrier to entries. Sg firms can easy employ lawyers from India, China (which are much cheaper and better)
(5) The accredited list of foreign unis is just one small issue. The fact they didn’t do anything about Australia unis show that such a move is symbolic to some extent.
(6) The introduction of third law school (focus on crim and fam) will increase competition among 2:2 grads from NUS and SMU bcos these individuals will be vying for the 1-5 man show or the Chinatown law firms.

Agree with everything you said except point 4 where you are very wrong on 2 counts. The quality of non Singaporean non Hong Kong non Western lawyers in less developed jurisdictions is generally rather poor unless they come from a top tier market leading firm in their home jurisdictions (eg 'red circle' Chinese law firms or Indian firms like Amarchand or azb) in which case they will be prime candidates competing for international firm roles and not local singapore law firm roles. Cheaper does not mean better.

Law is not unlike other industries where you can simply import cheaper FT labour to work on deals for cheap. There is a lot of emphasis on the individual candidate's background, whether he came from a prestigious school, what high value deals he had previously worked on. A cheaper lawyer with an LLB from Bangalore university isn't going to cut it, no offense. This is not IT support or compliance.

Secondly unlike in banks, lawyers work in very close knit teams on all their work, transactions and deals. Most partners will prefer to work with familiar local faces (or white people cos white man is king). They won't hire a random faceless FT into their head count just because he is cheap. People are discriminatory that way, its human nature.

So what’s the salary of sg big 4 vs uk magic circle

Originally Posted by Unregistered

So what’s the salary of sg big 4 vs uk magic circle

Double (2x)

amongst the big four firms, is it possible to rank them in terms of prestige/most recognised? thanks.