Of People, Paper (Lots of!) and Practice
I enjoyed reading the article “Reflections on 40 Years of Legal Practice” by Raymond Chan in the September 2024 issue of the Law Gazette. It conveyed, amongst other things, his experience of how he practised mainly construction law and arbitration in his accomplished career as well as his comments on the challenges and rewards of legal practice. Raymond was my classmate in law school, and like him, my practice has ended up also mainly in construction law and arbitration. However, our journeys have been different (as all journeys usually are!).
I started off my career mainly doing criminal defences, as a trainee and then an associate with Mr Leo Fernando, whom I highly regard as an inspiring legend in the local criminal law scene. In my three years with him, I learned many things which have lasted through the years, especially the value of hard work, a sense of humour and perspective, as well as courage in dealing with judges and adversaries. These values continued to be relevant even as I changed course in 1985 to try my hand at civil litigation. For this, I moved from a small legal practice to the polished corporate law firm, Arthur Loke & Partners, which shared premises and worked closely with the then largest law firm in the world, Baker & McKenzie (Bakers). It was a radical change, but the same lessons that applied to criminal law practice continued to apply to the world of civil and commercial litigation – i.e. long hours of hard work; the need to retain perspective while surrounded by legal and factual complexities, and technicalities; and the courage needed to act in your client’s best interests amidst battles with clever adversaries and often judges and tribunals with their own views.
With one big difference though: In criminal law practice, one dealt mainly with people (of all sorts!). In the world of corporate, commercial, and civil litigation, you grappled not only with many different characters but also with lots of paper! Documents and agreements (well-drafted and unbelievably badly done ones!), correspondence – later to include telexes, faxes, emails and nowadays WhatsApp messages which people never realised would end up as “evidence”. So much printed paper was involved in those early days, as “not printing” as a practice only came about in recent years.
When I entered the world of construction law especially, there was so much printed documentation involved. No evidence could withstand admissibility and scrutiny unless there was a document to support it – ranging from daily, weekly and monthly site and progress reports; detailed chronologies and witness statements; detailed forensic and experts’ reports; drawings, photographs and diagrams; lots of case authorities and much more.
I did my first construction case in the late 1980s. I remember the day when the senior partner in the firm, Mr Arthur Loke, asked me if I would like to try my hand at construction law, working with the lawyers from Bakers in a series of disputes between the client, the main contractor on the one part and the employer and about 10 sub-contractors on the other part. I then spent the next 12 years just dealing with that project, first as counsel in a series of cases in court (in which I succeeded in most, as I proudly recall); then as assistant to a silk in the arbitration; then taking over as lead counsel as the client found engaging silks and foreign law counsel to be too expensive; and then resolving all of the disputes, save for one acrimonious arbitration in which the client instructed we fight to the bitter end whatever the outcome as the two parties were then involved “commercially” on opposite sides in a war situation in another part of the world. The hearing for that arbitration went on for about 120 hearing days, which my adversary, the late Mr CS Wu, who was at that time the most prominent construction lawyer in Singapore, then was fond of calling “the mother of all arbitrations” at that time. No, I did not make a whole lot of money during that decade, as some of my peers might think, as I was merely a senior associate and salaried junior partner of the large firm I was in. In any case, being thrown into the deep end of the pool, with a baptism of fire, at that relatively early age was good for learning a lot about construction and arbitration. At that time, there was no internet to “google” anything and I did not have any in-house mentor for both of these subjects; I had to learn from the few books on those subjects available at that time (this was the late 1980s/early1990s). But working on intensive arbitrations during 10 years gave me little time to do anything else, hence my reputation as an intense “workaholic” till this day for anything I put my hands on.
Coming back to the subject of paper and documents, at that time there were no computer programs yet with word searches and such. So for those series of arbitrations, going through thousands of arch files of project documents had to be done manually, with a device called “summary sheets”, for which the firm employed about five to eight associates (working in a basement which we nicknamed the “dungeon”) to help plough through those millions of pages, mark and photostat relevant documents (under various categories such as “delay”, “defects”, “landscape”, “design”, “materials”, etc.) in order to assist with providing particulars for pleadings and contents of witness statements. It was such a tedious gruelling exercise that almost all the associates involved never wanted to practise construction law ever again! Whereas I was stuck in there, out of loyalty to the firm and the client, and lived out that project to the very end.
There then followed further decades, all the way to my late 60s where 90% of my work involved commercial disputes and construction, in Singapore and the region, for a series of matters, mainly as advisor and counsel in construction disputes for small, medium, and large construction and oil & gas companies (contractors, sub-contractors, developers and consultants). Later, this evolved into a re-invention of myself as an arbitrator, mediator, and adjudicator till the present day.
In 1999, I took a break from legal practice, and did a stint as CEO of the Law Society of Singapore, at the invitation of the then president, Mr George Lim. At that time, I was indeed suffering from a sort of “burn-out” after about 20 years of long hours in legal practice, and I felt I needed to do something different for a change. That stint was useful, dealing for two years with regulatory, disciplinary, and administrative matters of the legal profession.
In 2002, I returned to legal practice, rejuvenated, for the next 20 years and more of legal practice, first as a sole proprietor, then formation of group law practice Unilegal together with my good friend and smart construction lawyer Mr Kenneth Koh; later to a return as a “prodigal father” to my old firm ATMD, then to construction outfit Eldan Law, and now my own little practice Adelphi Law Chambers as a full-time arbitrator, mediator, and adjudicator. So in my 44 years of practice, I have worked in small, medium and large practices, as well as NGOs and various committee roles (including as chairman of the Society of Construction Law and as secretary and course leader in the Singapore Institute of Arbitrators), all rewarding and with their own challenges in various ways, trials and errors, and tribulations, experiences and lessons in dealing with all sorts of people and situations as well!
Coming back to the present, thankfully, nowadays we have computer programs and apps to make the job of information retrieval and research much easier; and the possibilities of virtual meetings and hearings to save a lot of time (thanks to what Covid compelled us to learn in quick time). Compared with, for example, a case in the 1990s where I, together with opposing counsel from elsewhere and three arbitrators from yet elsewhere, flew to Pennsylvania in the USA, for a 30-minute preliminary meeting. Don’t you think that was such a criminal waste of time and money? This is only one of many examples, but a lot of this kind of wastage of time and money used to happen in those days.
Things continue changing in the way we do things at work every year, month, week and day. I have not retired, and do not intend to do so, as I still enjoy about 70% of the work. Although it is a more balanced life, with books (more on Kindle and less paper copies); music (less vinyl and CDs, and more Spotify and guitar lessons); learning more of AI, IT and going more paperless; de-cluttering (in every way); exercise; sports; spirituality; friends and family (some in person, many online) to keep me company – such things always have been my companions through over four decades of work (all of which I have always thought to be good for the soul!).
If there are any values I could impart to younger lawyers from my modest though eventful 42 years in practice, it is the following: significantly the same things I have learnt in my own early years and which have “worked” till this day – there is no substitute for hard work, a sense of humour and perspective, as well as courage in dealing with everyone (the same things which I mentioned above). To which I will add, learning from my own trials and errors (of which there have been many!), the power to forgive (even if one cannot forget), accept changes and just move forward. As the great poet Robert Frost said,
“In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on”.
