The Singapore Law Gazette

Memories of Pupillage and Mentorship

The Law Society of Singapore has invited me to share my personal experiences of Pupillage and Mentorship both as a Pupil and as a Pupil Master.

My Pupillage

The story begins in 1968 when I joined Allen & Gledhill (A&G) as a Pupil. At that time, A&G was one of the big four firms in Singapore, albeit the smallest one. Donaldson & Burkinshaw was the largest, with a team of lawyers in the low teens. The other two firms were Drew & Napier and Rodyk & Davidson, each of which probably had around 10–12 lawyers. A&G only had eight lawyers: four Full Partners, two Salaried (non-equity) Partners and two Legal Associates (then called Legal Assistants).

When I arrived at the firm, I realised that I was the only Pupil in the whole firm. My Pupil Master was nominally M. Karthigesu (Karthi) (later to become Karthigesu JA) since I had applied to train in the litigation department. However, I was quickly hijacked by the Senior Partner, Robert (Bob) Booker (who was a company lawyer), because of the needs of his Company Law practice. In 1967, the new Companies Act came into force with major changes to our Company Law, as we were abandoning large chunks of our old law (which were based on the English Companies Act 1948) and replacing them with a substantially different code following the Victorian Companies Law Act 1961 as our model. A&G was one of the major company law firms practising in Singapore, and we had to change the Memorandum and Articles of Association of all our corporate clients, so Bob Booker needed a full-time Legal Assistant to draft the necessary changes under his guidance.

When I explained that I had earned my law degree from Oxford University which did not teach Company Law (although it now does), Bob simply said that he would give me the necessary education, which indeed he did. In order to change the Articles of Association of all our corporate clients, I had to change all references to the statutory provisions of the old Companies Ordinance by substituting (where appropriate) an equivalent section of the new Companies Act 1967. So I had to learn virtually the whole of Singapore Company Law (in terms of statutory law) under Bob Booker’s guidance.

However, while the job was taxing, I was not fully occupied with Karthi, as he was not used to having a Pupil, and he liked to do his own getting-up on his own cases, so he only gave me the files of cases where he was going to court, and would allow me to read them so that, when I accompanied him to court as a spectator, I could follow what was going on.

A great advantage of A&G was that, after my call to the Bar, I was the most junior lawyer in the firm and, apart from Bob and Karthi, there were six other lawyers from whom I could learn, because it was a very friendly firm. Three of the Partners went out together for lunch every day, and I was conveniently included in this lunch party because all four of us could fit into one taxi, and we would visit the different hawker stalls, clubs and restaurants. These three Partners were already close friends, and I was very kindly treated as a junior friend despite my youth and inexperience.

The three Partners were Goh Heng Leong (Heng Leong), Tan Tee Seng (Tee Seng) and Neoh Thean Hup (Thean Hup). Heng Leong’s family and my family were close friends and, although Heng Leong was 10 years my senior, we had a common bond since he was a graduate of Cambridge and I of Oxford. He had served for a number of years in the District Courts and Attorney-General’s Chambers, and had only joined A&G for about two or three years and was a Salaried Partner (and eventually became its Senior Partner). Tee Seng was a full Partner and a specialist in traffic accidents, and had a few large insurance companies as his regular clients. Thean Hup (also a Salaried Partner) had transitioned from being a civil servant to a qualified lawyer, and specialised in conveyancing. So our daily conversation would be about their respective files which were occupying them. From them I acquired a lot of practical knowledge about legal practice which I could never have done from a formal education, which did not teach me how to deal with real-life legal problems that these three practitioners were engaged in on a daily basis.

Having listened to their war stories, I decided that I should try and learn the basic steps of their respective practice areas. So I would pick up the leads from our lunch conversations and, when I went back to the office, I would ask them to show me some of their files to explain the legal issues they were dealing with from their various files. From here I started expanding my legal knowledge and experience.

Heng Leong had a broader range of subject matters to deal with in his practice, and engaged in composing well-reasoned legal opinions to which I occasionally made some small contributions), so I learnt how to write formal opinions for clients as well as how to write briefs to Queen’s Counsel when we needed advice from London or Australia. I also sought out the other lawyers in the firm to ask them to teach me their respective practice areas. The most senior Partner in property matters was Stuart Ashcroft (Stuart), who was an English solicitor specialising in conveyancing. He taught me how to draft a master form of leases for commercial buildings, and this became a very useful skill for me as, in my later practice, I was able to engage in working for developers and bankers in drafting master leases, sale agreements or mortgages. Thean Hup also taught me how to deduce a 30-year title for real property held under the common law system, which was still the prevailing system of land titles in Singapore at that time, although our Torrens title system was also developing at a fast pace, and I had to learn the Torrens system as well from the Post-Final Practical Training Course, which all law graduates seeking admission to the Bar had to undergo.

There was a lady Senior Legal Assistant called Rosalind (Rose) Ratnam (later to be a Partner), and she specialised in trademark registrations and mass leases which were derived from master leases created by Stuart. So in fact her forte was to do mass production of lease documents to ensure that each one of the leases (as well as dozens of applications for trademarks) were drafted perfectly without any mistakes. So I learnt from her and our trademark registration clerk how to apply for a trademark, and helped her handle her bulk tenancy agreements practice, which experience enabled me eventually to do mass conveyancing transactions for my own clients.

After about two years of doing Company Law work, I felt the need to engage with human clients rather than be a back-room lawyer just drafting documents. So I asked to be allowed to take on litigation files. This led to my handling all of Tee Seng’s running-down cases in the District and Magistrate Courts, which was a god-send in forcing me to learn about court practice, both for civil cases as well as criminal cases. This was because the drivers I had to defend were often charged in the traffic courts for careless or even dangerous driving, so I had to learn how to navigate my way through the Criminal Procedure Code and Evidence Act as well as the District Court Rules for civil cases. Another way of learning was from my role (as the most junior lawyer in the firm) to attend the Criminal and Civil District Courts for all the mentions that were being heard of the cases which our litigation lawyers were handling. Not only did I get exposure to all these case files (which I had to look through to understand the background to the application being heard in court that day), I also had to sit for several hours because, owing to my junior position at the Bar, I had to sit and listen to all the other more senior lawyers mentioning their cases, and would learn about different types of cases coming through the courts and how more senior lawyers addressed the Court, and dealt with the standard questions that the Court would be asking. I also gained valuable experience in advocacy, and cross examination and submissions became part of my regular diet of cases. Only after a year of learning my craft in litigation was I allowed to start handling cases on my own in the High Court.

I also became good friends with the other Legal Assistant, Tan Kim Seng, who had worked in the Official Assignee’s office before joining A&G, and I learnt some aspects of Insolvency Law from him. I went on holiday with his family once to Mersing, and interacted with his two sons, Chuan Thye (now a Senior Counsel) and Chuan Yong (now a senior Partner in Tan Kim Seng & Partners) as well as his wife, Lye Sou Lan (now the Managing Partner of Tan Kim Seng & Partners) – a true family of lawyers. By a stroke of fate, Chuan Thye eventually gained admission to Oxford to read law, gaining a first class honours degree, and when he returned to Singapore, I was happy to employ him in A&G, and was fortunate that he was able to join me as a Judicial Law Clerk in the Supreme Court when I later served as Judicial Commissioner.

Despite educating myself on all aspects of the practice areas that were being undertaken by the firm as a whole, I still had some time on my hands, and one of the tools that law firms in those days used to educate their pupils was called the “Letter Book”. This was the master file containing office copies of all correspondence written by the firm which was collected every day from the secretaries of the lawyers, and then bundled up and bound on a weekly basis. So, every letter written by every lawyer was usually typed with at least three carbon copies:

1. the first carbon copy of the letter going out which was kept in the particular file for that matter;
2. if there was a copy for client, then that was sent to the client; and
3. the third copy was filed in the “Letter Book”.

The purpose of the “Letter Book” was in case the office file containing that matter was lost. Theoretically, we could find our own copy of any letter that had been sent out by any lawyer in such situations, and that was the main rationale for the “Letter Book”, but it was also a guide for Pupils to look through the letters written by the lawyers in the course of their practice to enhance the Pupils’ education. Reading the Letter Book regularly (as I did) gave me exposure to:

1. how to write letters from lawyer to lawyer using appropriate language;
2. how to write letters to clients; and
3. how to write letters to government departments.

That was just a question of style. The substance of these letters also helped in increasing my:

1. knowledge about various laws; and
2. exposure to practical and legal issues concerning the kind of transaction or court matter that was the subject of the letter.

From Pupil to Pupil Master

When I was called to the Bar, the qualification to be a Pupil Master was to have had five years in active practice out of the preceding seven years. This was widely understood to mean that a lawyer had to be called for seven years, and had to have practised for not less than five years during that period, and it was widely believed that this involved fulfilling two criteria:

1. seven years since actual call; and
2. five years of actual practice.

However, soon after my call to the Bar in 1968, I think it was Chan Sek Keong JC (as he then was) who issued a judgment saying that so long as a lawyer had five years’ experience since his call, he could qualify to be a Pupil Master even if he had not been called for seven years. So I started to take on pupils as soon as I reached the fifth anniversary of my call.

I also had over the years engaged in what used to be called “Corporate Finance and Merchant Banking” (now commonly called Investment Banking and Private Banking) as well as Conveyancing and Property matters, and I would also be involved with the Legal Assistants from the other departments for non-contentious projects, even if they were not officially my pupils.

We did not have a structured programme for skills enhancement other than to work with junior lawyers on one or more files. It was rare in those days to have more than one Legal Assistant for any given file. Working with a Legal Assistant on any files in any field would inevitably be a learning experience and skills enhancement exercise for the Legal Assistant concerned. I would of course have my own way of dealing with litigation and arbitration files, which could be quite different from what would be needed from a Legal Assistant on a corporate finance file or a property transaction file. For disputes files, I needed research into the facts and law, and for non-contentious work, I needed help in drafting commercial documents (with full understanding of legal terms used and careful proof-reading), which brings me to the next big point I want to make about what is one of the most important legal skills to pick up, apart from competence in the law and a dedication to hard work.

Proof-reading

Whichever discipline any Pupils or young Legal Assistants were engaged in, I would always teach them the importance of proof-reading as an essential part of being a practising lawyer. This was the first skill that was drummed into me by Bob Booker when I was in my first year of practice, and I was proof-reading company law documents, especially Memoranda and Articles of Association before the time when master forms were kept in computers or floppy disks (and master forms of conveyancing documents for mortgages and leases were filed in the Registry of Titles). So every long document, especially formal documents (such as pleadings), and corporate and conveyancing documents, had to be proof-read, first by the typist who prepared the document from handwritten drafts, and then by the responsible lawyer himself or herself.

This skill was particularly important for documents such as commercial agreements, memoranda and articles of association and conveyancing documents. While pleadings and affidavits filed in court needed to be as close to word-perfect as possible so as to give the Court a good impression of the professionalism of the lawyer that filed the document, in case of any mistake, it would usually be possible to amend a court document with the leave of the Court. However, in the case of contractual documents, and particularly conveyancing documents (which had to be registered in the Registry of Deeds or Titles), mistakes were extremely difficult to amend unless both parties to the document could agree on the exact changes to be made. Failing agreement, an application had to be made to the Court for the relief of contract rectification (which was rarely granted unless by consent), and (if there was already a dispute about whether an obvious mistake had been made) the issue of rectifying the mistake when one party did not agree that was a mistake had been made would have to be resolved by litigation. So such mistakes could have expensive consequences, and it might not be possible to resolve the problem of:

1. acknowledgement of the mistake; and
2. how that mistake should be rectified to arrive at the true common intentions of the parties.

Even punctuation was important, as a misplaced comma or full-stop could affect the interpretation of a sentence, and would at least cause ambiguity, which might place the client at some risk of an adverse interpretation leading to an adverse outcome with financial consequences.

Allen & Gledhill and Pupillage

The other Partners in Allen & Gledhill in those early days were not especially keen on taking pupils, as our old office in Raffles Place only had rooms for the existing eight lawyers (plus myself). So, we did not advertise for pupils, but only entertained applications from persons who had some connections with at least one of the Partners. I was the only one who was really interested in being a Pupil Master, and I recall that in every year after my fifth year of practice, I took at least one pupil. When I retired from the firm at the end of 2002 and set up my sole practice, I took with me one Legal Assistant from A&G and thereafter engaged at least one, and then two, and then three, and finally four Pupils or Associates until very recently, when I dropped to two or three per year. There are several dozens of lawyers out there in Singapore (and some elsewhere) who have been mentored by me over the last half century. It would be an invidious task to say which of my past Pupils or Mentees were the best, but I can just say that they included three Senior Counsel, a High Court Judge, an Appellate Court Judge, a Judicial Commissioner and two Professors of Law.

End Note

I remember my memories as a pupil and a junior lawyer learning my craft with fondness and gratitude to my former mentors. I can only hope that those lawyers who have worked under me either directly or indirectly feel the same.

For junior lawyers who read this essay, I would advise you that legal practice can be a rewarding avocation, both in terms of job satisfaction in acquiring life and work experience that will enrich a conscientious lawyer’s life, as well as personal satisfaction if you can contribute positively to your client in terms of achieving some milestone in the client’s business or personal affairs, and (hopefully) making a meaningful impact on that client’s appreciation of you as a dedicated and caring professional adviser.