More law grads taking the road less travelled

Four SMU School of Law alumni were featured as examples of law graduates taking the road less travelled. After working in two top legal firms for almost three years, SMU alumnus Algene Tan decided to take a different path that allows him to be his own boss and to teach. He co-founded a tuition school, Think Teach Academy. For SMU alumnus and lawyer Marcus Li, it is "entirely a personal choice" whether one becomes a practising lawyer, takes the Bar exam under the decoupling scheme, or goes straight into a non-law career. He was a corporate restructuring lawyer before he took up the position of general counsel at Slate Alt, an investment and capital raising firm that focuses on deep technologies. After graduating from SMU in 2014, Chan Yuk Lun founded SingaporeLegalAdvice.com, which began as a blog when he was in law school. These days, the site sees about 170,000 visits a month, and is described as Singapore's go-to legal platform. The fourth SMU alumnus Chang Zi Qian co-founded local legal tech start-up Intellex. "We still see ourselves as members of the legal industry," Mr Chang said, adding that they wanted to leverage technology and be the change they wanted to see in the industry.