Singapore, 2 February 2018 (Friday) – In line with the nationwide SkillsFuture movement, and to support current and future training and development needs of Singapore’s legal fraternity Singapore, Singapore Management University (SMU) today officially announced the rebranding of its School of Law’s Continuing Legal Education (CLE) arm as SMU Law Academy.

The SMU School of Law has, since 2010, been a Singapore Institute of Legal Education (SILE) -accredited service provider of Continuing Professional Development (CPD).  To date, the law school’s CLE arm has an established track record of providing the legal profession with high quality seminars and auditing programmes to stay informed about contemporary legal developments, with a total of about 1,000 participants taking up its collection of some 30 seminars and workshops organised each year.  

Going forward, the legal profession can look forward to a calendar that features a wider range of SILE-accredited seminars and an even better line-up of prominent faculty members, practitioners and judges as SMU Law Academy speakers.  To help practitioners better plan and schedule their participation, seminars offered by the Academy will, from now on, typically be organised on Friday afternoons, which was found to be the timeslot most preferred by practitioners.

Feedback and past participation statistics also showed that seminars which discuss recent case law and legislative developments in specific legal areas have been particularly well-received by legal practitioners.  Such seminars enable practitioners to upgrade their knowledge in a short time-span, and to appreciate synergies between developments across legal domains.  Responding to this strong demand, the SMU Law Academy will schedule more of these ‘Updates and Topical Developments’ seminars going forward.  Two other categories of seminars will be on offer, namely ‘Foreign and Comparative Law’ and ‘Fundamentals of Law’.

Additionally, the SMU Law Academy will pursue collaborations with other players in the continuing education field to further enhance its range and quality of activities.  In late December 2017, it concluded a partnership with the Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA), under which SIDRA will run its CPD programmes through the SMU Law Academy.

Under an MOU signed in January 2018, SMU School of Law affirmed its support towards the Singapore Academy of Law’s Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) by offering carefully curated modular programmes on legal innovation for firms participating in FLIP.  When ready, these will be offered through the SMU Law Academy.  

Furthermore, there are plans afoot for collaboration with the SMU Academy, the University’s life-long learning unit, to roll out interdisciplinary training courses, including on law-and-technology.

Associate Professor Goh Yihan, Dean of SMU School of Law, said, “That the practice of law is growing increasingly complex renders it ever more important for legal practitioners to keep themselves up to date across a broad range of legal subjects, as well as learn about new and developing areas of the law.  We see the opportunity to contribute significantly to the continuing education needs of the legal fraternity through the SMU Law Academy.”

“The School of Law’s strong track record in undergraduate and postgraduate legal education over the last 10 years, and the high-quality continuing education programmes offered since 2010, certainly stand us in good stead to now enhance our professional development curriculum in a targeted manner, including extending our outreach to an audience beyond the legal fraternity,” he added.

Associate Professor Maartje de Visser, who is Associate Dean (Postgraduate Teaching & Curriculum) at SMU School of Law, said, “Building on our law school’s reputation, and leveraging our faculty's expertise as well as SMU’s prime location in the vicinity of law firms and the Courts, the SMU Law Academy offers an exciting range of carefully curated seminars and courses for practitioners, including our growing body of alumni.  Through better alignment of the format and content of our offerings to the needs and schedules of the legal industry, we want the Academy to be their go-to source of information about relevant legal developments, here in Singapore and abroad.” 

For more info on the SMU Law Academy, please visit: https://law.smu.edu.sg/smula

[Featured photo: Dean Goh Yihan announcing SMU Law Academy on 2 February 2018.]

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