Lawyer glut: Practicing certificates to increase by 30% in the next 3 years

Far beyond Singapore’s 3% economy growth.

In March 2013, there were 4,432 lawyers with practicing certificates, up 25% from 2009. Add to that the increasing number of law students and what do you get? An oversupply.

That’s according to Law Minister K Shanmugan in a speech during the NUS-SMU Criminal Justice Conference a few days ago.

According to Shanmugan, the oversupply is due to a disproportion in the number of students reading law overseas to the relatively small legal market in Singapore.

The minister cautions law students that they should be aware of the numbers and be realistic as to what they can do if they are thinking of practice.

Here’s more from the speech:

If you look at the UK universities, the number has more than doubled. Between 2010 and 2013, just in those three years, the number has doubled from 510 to 1,142. The number has increased very significantly and very quickly. This has implications for students in the context of a relatively small legal market in Singapore.

Number of students in Australian universities has also increased by more than 25% just between 2011 and 2013, so there’s been an explosion. If you take 2010 to 2013 there has been a very significant explosion from 303 to 386.

From 2009 we’ve been studying these figures and it hasn’t been easy to get the figures in the first place because people can go overseas and they don’t need to tell us that they are studying law, there is no rule or law which says you got to register with the government of Singapore, and often people could start in one course and switch, so we really don’t have a clear fix on what students are doing, but these are the numbers we are able to get, and they may understate rather than overstate.