Singapore, 13 June 2011 (Monday) – The entire pioneer cohort of students from the Singapore Management University's (SMU) School of Law has secured practice training contracts* three months before graduation. These findings were from a survey of the SMU's School of Law's pioneer cohort of 106 law students, as well as information provided by Singapore's major law firms.
Only four law students did not secure practice training contracts with a law firm because they have each decided on a different path after graduation - one is a Singapore Police Force scholar who needs to serve out her bond with the Singapore Police Force, another decided to pursue her interest in film production in New York, the third has chosen to take up an appointment with the Ministry of Education, and the fourth has decided to take a year off to pursue her personal interests.
The law firm that has accepted the most law students from SMU's pioneer cohort as practice trainees is Rajah & Tann LLP, one of Singapore's leading law firms whose distinguished alumni include Judge of Appeal Justice VK Rajah, Justices Steven Chong and Quentin Loh, and the Attorney-General, Mr Sundaresh Menon, SC.
Mr Lee Eng Beng, Senior Counsel and Managing Partner of Rajah & Tann LLP, said, “The SMU law degree is held in high regard by Rajah & Tann. This is not only because of the sterling reputation of SMU and the standard, content and scope of the legal education and training given by the SMU School of Law to its students.
We have gotten to know many of the SMU law students through our internship programme and in the course of working with them to sponsor or organize activities within the School, and have been very impressed by their ability, diligence and spiritedness.”
Other law firms which have taken in SMU's students for practice training include Drew & Napier LLC, WongPartnership LLP, Allen & Gledhill LLP, Rodyk & Davidson LLP, Lee & Lee, Colin Ng & Partners LLP, KhattarWong and Michael Hwang Chambers. The Singapore Legal Service is another significant practice training ground for SMU's law students.
The SMU Bachelor of Laws (LL.B) programme, which combines a mix of law core courses and law-related courses, is specially designed to enable its law graduates to become more competent and practice-oriented lawyers by equipping them with contextual and cross-border knowledge and expertise. The programme bears SMU's distinctive hallmark of holistic learning, interactive seminar-style pedagogy, and international and practical exposure. Another distinctive feature of the LL.B programme is that legal practitioners from law firms are invited to participate in the classroom teaching of LL.B courses as associates, which provides SMU's law undergraduates the opportunity to learn directly from these legal practitioners' expertise and experience. SMU's law undergraduates are also required to undertake a 10-week internship with a law firm, the legal department of government-linked companies / multinational corporations or a public sector regulatory body, as well as serve 80 hours with a Voluntary Welfare Organisation (VWO) or organizations involved in pro bono and legal aid work.
About the SMU School of Law
Officially approved on 5 January 2007, the School of Law proudly welcomed its first batch of 116 participants in August 2007.
SMU's undergraduate law programme aims to mould participants into excellent lawyers who will contribute significantly to society. The objective is to produce law graduates who have contextualized legal expertise and the ability to think across disciplines and geographical borders. In terms of pedagogy, SMU's seminar-style learning is put to good effect to nurture graduates who are confident, articulate and analytically agile.
The Law School offers a four-year full-time LL.B (Bachelor of Law) programme; a five-year double-degree programme which combines law with SMU's existing non-law programmes in Accountancy, Business, Economics, Information Systems and Social Sciences; and more recently, a 12-month LLM (Master of Laws) Law programme, which is the first and only one in Singapore to incorporate the LLM in Islamic Law and Finance.
The School of Law also offers a full-time graduate programme called the Juris Doctor (J.D.) Programme. It follows the same academic calendar/grading scheme as the LL.B programme and can be completed within three years. However the programme may be accelerated in some cases for completion within two years.
The School of Law faculty comprises a collegial team with postgraduate degrees from renowned universities worldwide such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and London.
* A person with the necessary legal qualifications must serve a practice training period by receiving supervised training in relation to the practice of Singapore law under a practice training contract with a Singapore law practice, or through working as a Legal Service Officer, or under the supervision of a qualifying relevant legal officer, before he may be admitted as an advocate and solicitor of the Singapore Bar.
The duration of the practice training period is six months. However, if the supervised training is through working as a Legal Service Officer or through working under the supervision of a qualifying relevant legal officer, six months of such supervised training will only count as one month of his practice training period, i.e. the practice training period will be a total of three years.