Lawyer Salary

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Mate the 5% was to catch up with the US firms 2020 fall bonus plus 5% is a joke compared to these. These are also 2021 spring and fall bonuses.

Means what. They snook us in singapore? Why they dont pay? Baker refused to remove pay freeze in Jan.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

How come the government now trying to promote ceca breeding with Singaporeans? Quite disgusting imho s://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/eat-drink-man-woman-16/another-subtle-race-mixing-brain-washing-ad-govt-6485553.html

Arent you already mingling at work with Ceca? Maybe your roommate hehehehehehe

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Law is no longer as prestigious as it used to be hahhaah

Lol yeah check out the 2020 NUS graduate employment survey - NUS comp science grads now earn 5.7k mean, vs NUS law 5k. 92.6% vs 86.8% full time employment. Law is a poor proposition for the new generation of smart kids.

Shoutout to the NUS biz, biz analytics and med grads with higher mean salaries than NUS law too.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Lol yeah check out the 2020 NUS graduate employment survey - NUS comp science grads now earn 5.7k mean, vs NUS law 5k. 92.6% vs 86.8% full time employment. Law is a poor proposition for the new generation of smart kids.

Shoutout to the NUS biz, biz analytics and med grads with higher mean salaries than NUS law too.

Per hour law slaves earn less than Grab drivers

Originally Posted by Unregistered

NUS Law graduates on average getting 3.8k to 4.5k after graduation

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.

Thank you very much. Very well informed advice

Originally Posted by Unregistered

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.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

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.

The argument that eventually earning power is predicated on being a small business owner is also applicable to other industries - plenty of tech and finance people learn the ropes at big companies, and then proceed to start their own companies and funds. I suppose the main argument is that law provides a fairly streamlined and straightforward path to being a partner or setting up your own practice, but partners or sole proprietors aren't made from people who don't already have business development skills. These BD skills would probably be remunerated by the tech and finance industry just as well, or even better.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

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.

well said but look at this entire thread, or indeed this entire forum.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

The argument that eventually earning power is predicated on being a small business owner is also applicable to other industries - plenty of tech and finance people learn the ropes at big companies, and then proceed to start their own companies and funds. I suppose the main argument is that law provides a fairly streamlined and straightforward path to being a partner or setting up your own practice, but partners or sole proprietors aren't made from people who don't already have business development skills. These BD skills would probably be remunerated by the tech and finance industry just as well, or even better.

That may be partially true and I don't disagree. But the natural and inevitable progression of a private practice lawyer is to become a small business owner - whether as a sole proprietor, a part-owner in a boutique/small firm, or an equity partner in a large firm responsible for your team's headcount. It is what makes law as a professional service line unique, compared to even the nearest equivalent professional services, i.e. auditor/accountant.

The overwhelming majority of lawyers who remain in private are going to be a small business owner in some way. A tiny number will remain as "of counsel" or "professional support lawyers" (until they quit or are deemed to expensive to keep). How many investment bankers or coders will actually get to open their investment management firm or hedge fund or run/start a tech firm?

My point is not about comparing earning capacities of law versus other fields. No apples-to-apples comparison can be made in the first place since "law" is an extremely narrow field in comparison to the world of "finance" and "tech", the latter being such broad umbrella descriptions for a multitude of roles and job scopes. That's as meaningless as trying to make comparisons between a "Honda CB400 Super4 motorcycle" and a "motorcar".

What is the starting law salary for a local graduate?

I've just graduated from NUS law and passed the bar exam last year but didn't manage to land a job due to COVID. This year was offered 4.2k, is this fine?