Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon: Closing remarks at the Legal Profession Symposium 2025

Legal Profession Symposium 2025

Closing Remarks

"The Future of the Legal Profession: A Shared Vision"

Tuesday, 29 July 2025

The Honourable the Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon^*

Supreme Court of Singapore

I. Introduction

1. We have had rich and productive discussions throughout this long day, and I would like to round it off by pulling together several threads, and highlighting the key things that I really wish we will take away from today.

(a) First, I want to underscore the nature and implications of the rapid, dramatic and complex changes that are upon us. 

(b) Second, I want to emphasise how important it is for us to recognise that the challenges to our profession have a single core characteristic. They are essentially what we might refer to as “wicked” problems that cannot be solved by linear thinking or single-actor solutions.⁽¹⁾

(c) And third, looking ahead, I want us all to commit to the project of making sure that we will find new and innovative measures to address and deal with the issues that we have been speaking about. 

II. Rapid, Dramatic and Complex Changes

2. You heard from Professor David Wilkins and others today, as well as previously, about the rapid, dramatic and complex challenges that we are facing. Let me give you a flavour of some of these:

(a) an increasingly uncertain and unstable geopolitical environment;

(b) the exponential growth of the capabilities and consequently also of the use of artificial intelligence (or “AI”);

(c) the urgent and existential threat of climate change; 

(d) the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation, facilitated and exacerbated by social media channels;

(e) rising levels of inequality and the consequences that has on the global access to justice crisis;

(f) the collective impact of some of these factors on declining trust in public institutions;

(g) the threat of recurrent public health crises; 

(h) the global market for young talent seeking meaningful and purposeful work that can provide reasonable remuneration and work-life balance; and

(i) the growing commercialisation of traditional professions like ours. 

3. What is notable is that these developments all impact us as lawyers, some more directly than others. Yet, many of these challenges did not even exist or were not even recognised at the time when at least some of us in this room began practice several decades ago. 

4. Together, these spell changes in the work of lawyers, the type of education and training that they will need in order to function effectively, and the way in which they are going to be hired, organised and developed. And collectively they represent a change in kind, not just in degree.

5. To add to this, the pace of these changes is proving to be remarkable. These challenges are evolving day by day and new challenges will emerge. Most of us would not have even heard about the concept of generative AI three years ago. Today, it is an unavoidable part of any serious conversation concerning business or public activity. 

6. These change also do not operate in isolation. They exacerbate and act upon one another, and they coalesce to form that “perfect long storm” that has been mentioned before,⁽²⁾ or as David unforgettably put it this morning, they are “everything, everywhere, all at once”. And they are existential challenges in that for our purposes, they have a direct bearing on society’s continued access to the rule of law and their trust in the legal profession. 

7. Because these challenges impact the profession in many ways, and because they fundamentally reshape what it means to be a lawyer, we need to think and rethink many aspects of the practice of law:

(a) how we attract, retain and develop talent;

(b) how we train our younger lawyers and, as David mentioned, how we create environments that facilitate continuous learning and development;

(c) how we mentor them and ensure their well-being;

(d) how we evaluate the performance of lawyers in a way that reflects their true value to our organisations and their potential;

(e) how we ensure their fair remuneration; 

(f) how we integrate technology into legal work and ensure that we are providing value-added legal services to our clients;

(g) how we maintain our ethical and professional standards and promote our core values amidst the growing commercialisation of legal practice;

and the list goes on. 

8. Where am I going with all this? I suggest that what we need is a willingness to accept a fundamental reset when thinking about how we will tackle these issues. This is essential if we are to ensure that we will have a sustainable practising profession as we venture together into the future. The horizon of our imagination cannot be limited to incremental changes at the edges. That is why we have invested the time and the effort to bring together so many people over the course of today and the next two days, because this is important work. 

9. In particular, we need a reset that incorporates a commitment to more thoughtful and more personalised training and mentorship, to meet the expectations of our young lawyers. We must also equip our younger colleagues with the knowledge and skills to deal with the inevitable disruptive force of AI that will define their careers in the law and the future of our profession. Indeed, this is an urgent need that applies to the profession as a whole. AI is here to stay and, as the Minister for Law said, we must embrace it. And as David said, the future of the profession is not a binary choice between machines and humans – rather, it is the tremendous potential that can be untapped when humans learn how to harness the power of AI. There is a real opportunity there, and we have to equip our lawyers to be able to seize it. 

10. Let me digress to make a related point. It was mentioned in the last panel that there has never been a better time to be a lawyer. Let me say that I have enormous confidence in the business prospects for our profession. Indeed, we have long seen Singapore as a leading legal and business hub in ASEAN, a region of more than 670 million people with tremendous economic potential.⁽³⁾ We have in the arbitration space journeyed from being a relatively unattractive seat in the 1980s to becoming one of the world’s leading centres for arbitration.⁽⁴⁾ And our courts are widely respected internationally for the quality of our work. 

11. But that is not the challenge that we are here to discuss. We are here to discuss how we can retain, develop and empower our human capital in this sector because that is what is needed now more than ever, in order to reap the benefits that we have created through the system we have established.

12. I went back and checked my records and found that the first time I publicly raised some of these issues, such as the dramatic changes we can expect from technology, was in January 2016. This was in the keynote speech that I delivered at the annual Supreme and Federal Courts Judges’ Conference of Australia and New Zealand.⁽⁵⁾ In the years since then, you have heard me raise these issues on several occasions. Nine years is a very long time in the context of the speed and scale at which things are changing. But today you heard it from the world’s leading expert on the study of the legal profession, David Wilkins. In his words, “this thing is here and it is like a freight train”. We need to take heed of this reality and commit to acting now, together as a community. 

III. “Wicked” Problems 

13. That leads to my second main point. This morning, David distinguished between what he termed technical challenges and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges are those where the problem is well understood and the range of solutions are known; whereas adaptive challenges are those where both the scale and scope of the problem is poorly understood or ill-defined, and the solutions are, in essence, unknown, and have to be worked out as we go along. The issues we face are in the latter category. 

14. In another speech, I referred to such issues as “wicked” problems”,⁽⁶⁾ borrowing an expression coined by design theorists in the 1970s to describe multi-dimensional problems that arise from multiple causes, and which involve many moving parts. By their very nature, “wicked” problems cannot be resolved by conventional straight-line thinking or single-actor one-shot solutions. That is why when discussing the sustainability of private practice earlier this morning, I suggested the need for broad-based solutions that will entail, among other things, reaching out to law students even before they enter law school, reimagining our approach to the education and formation of our lawyers, and embracing the widespread, informed and effective adoption of generative AI.

15. How should we address adaptive challenges or “wicked” problems? 

16. Let me suggest that we have to recognise the need to engage multiple stakeholders to understand the problem and to generate the solutions. I would like to remind you of David’s slide where he pointed to the issue of bringing people back to the office. He talked about the different stakeholders within the law firm – the partners, the associates, the supporting professionals and other groups of people – and how essential it is to take into account the interests of each of those stakeholders in order to arrive at sustainable solutions. That is the kind of approach we will need to take.

17. In short, we will need to find meaningful, effective and lasting solutions that can reasonably accommodate the interests of as many stakeholders as possible. It is not going to be easy. 

IV. A Commitment to Action 

18. But that leads to my third main point this evening. The aim of this event is not to be cowed by what is ahead of us, but to find solutions and to commit to a plan of action. On this, let me make three points. 

19. First, let me emphasise that this Symposium is not a terminal point. To the contrary, this is the beginning of an iterative process that is going to continue after this three-day Symposium. This is the time from which we will step forward, have further discussions to address the issues we have been canvassing, and through that process come up with solutions. 

20. It is in line with this that we launched the Mindful Business Movement today, which represents a collective commitment to improve the sustainability of the profession. The Mindful Business Movement aims to drive awareness and adoption of the Sustainability Principles, support their practical implementation in legal workplaces, and promote the mental health and well-being of members of the profession.

21. I want to acknowledge the leadership of the founding partners – the SAL, the Mindful Business Charter (UK), the Mindful Business Singapore, Temasek Holdings and WorkWell Leaders – along with the 22 partners who have pledged their support, comprising law firms, legal departments and government institutions. 

22. We need these kinds of interventions not because our younger colleagues today are somehow more fragile than we were. There is a tendency to say “I went through that, why can’t they”. Rather, we need these interventions because the pressures that affect the profession today are dramatically different from anything that we went through. We need to recognise that and do something about it. And so I strongly encourage all our law firms and legal departments to sign up to this movement. 

23. Apart from the Sustainability Principles and the Living Case Study, the SAL will develop other resources to support the movement. It will strive to enhance the training for our future leaders of the profession, to ensure that they can build strong practices, lead effective teams and harness technology effectively.

24. On this note, while we had originally intended to discuss some of these topics and draft resources today, we could not cover them all because of time constraints. But the SAL will follow up with further sessions to co-develop these resources with you. Let me share three examples of these upcoming initiatives:

(a) First, the SAL will develop a Strategy Playbook to help upcoming and newly appointed leaders consider, reflect and evaluate their strengths and their roles in the leadership and management of law practices.

(b) Second, the SAL will develop a series of Five-Step Guides to flesh out the Sustainability Principles, beginning with the need for mindful delegation and mindful communications.

(c) And third, the SAL will work with our strategic partners to support the adoption of AI by law practices, such as by organising hands-on technology clinics. 

25. But let me return to what I said earlier about the sustainability of the profession being a “wicked” problem. The measures and initiatives that we have introduced today and will introduce soon are the early steps. They will not be sufficient to address the scale of the issues that we have to deal with. We will need to find, as I said, meaningful, effective and lasting solutions. This starts with lawyers, especially our senior lawyers, recognising the need for a fundamental reset and having the foresight and the courage to be willing to rethink how they run their law firms and manage their junior colleagues.

26. Part of the answer will lie in recognising that we belong to a community. This was a point that featured prominently in the last panel. There were several nostalgic reflections about the things we used to do in the old days. But we have to find new ways of fostering this sense of community because it may not be realistic to replicate all the ways we used to do it. Let me share with you an example involving a particular constituency that is close to my heart – the Criminal Bar. We have a quarterly meeting between the Criminal Bar, the Attorney-General’s Chambers (or “AGC”) and the Courts. At the last meeting, one of the issues raised by the Bar was the reality that criminal practice can be traumatic at times for young practitioners. The Bar therefore suggested that we should form a community of support for these young lawyers to help them through these experiences. We are supporting that excellent idea and we are working together to think about how we can make it a reality. 

27. My point is that by having these conversations, we can create the structures that will underscore the fact that we are a community. To our young colleagues, I say to you, we will not leave you alone. That is why we have gathered today and that is why we are here. Together, we care about your future and we are committed to making sure that you will have as rewarding and enriching a career as all the seniors here have had. 

28. But beyond this, I commit to you that we will bring together all our stakeholders – the Ministry of Law, the AGC, the Bar, the universities, the Judiciary and others. We will work together to better understand the full implications of all that is upon us and find and develop cohesive new ways to address them. This will include the key areas of education and training. The Minister mentioned in his remarks this unique aspect of the Singapore way, and I want to echo and reiterate the point that this is our secret sauce. The ability to bring all these stakeholders together, confront these problems and challenges, and find solutions is what has made us exceptional in many ways. We are a small city state and to survive, we have got to pool whatever resources we can, hold that together, find the solutions and have the drive and determination to implement them. And I commit to you that is what we will do. So I invite all of you to be a part of this effort. I repeat: the point of this exercise is not to be cowed by what is ahead of us, but to look ahead, stare at it and deal with it. 

V. Conclusion

29. It has been a really long day and I want to conclude with a few words of appreciation.

30. First and foremost, I want to thank my colleague Justice Valerie Thean, my friend Mr Jimmy Yim SC and the entire team at the SAL, Mr Yeong Zee Kin, Mr Paul Neo and their supporting crew. They have laboured for months in the lead up to today’s event and I am really grateful that they have led this effort and pulled this off. 

31. Next, I want to thank all the speakers and moderators for the excellent and thought-provoking sessions. We need to have these honest conversations in order to understand and confront what we are up against. And having these honest conversations requires people to think deeply about what they truly care about, and to have the courage to come and tell people this is how they view it and how they feel about it. And for that commitment, that effort and the honesty with which we have had these conversations today, my heartfelt appreciation goes out to all of you.

32. A special word of thanks to my friend, Professor David Wilkins. David was teaching at Harvard Law School when I was there in 1990. It struck me then as most peculiar that there could be a person whose life was dedicated to the study of the legal profession. As he said, this was not regarded as law – this was about lawyers. But what prescience and what brilliance because today he is the world’s expert on thinking about what is happening to the legal profession and how this vital community needs to face up to new and challenging issues and come up with solutions. And we are so blessed to have David work with us. I thank him for facilitating our event, for delivering a tremendous keynote, for curating the programme and for his guidance throughout this entire process. Thank you, David! 

33. And lastly, I want to thank each and every one of you. It takes time to come here and it takes commitment to feel that this is an important enough subject for you to spend the entire day here. It has been a very successful event and that is because you are here and you have engaged fully with us. I call for your support to continue this journey with us. I repeat that this is not the end; in many respects it is the beginning of the journey we need to take. I am confident that it will be a worthwhile journey because we have so much to look forward to, and if anyone can address these issues, I firmly believe we can and we will. 

34. To that end, I look forward to seeing you next year when we will have another Symposium to take stock and to chart the course of our progress. I thank you all very much and I look forward to continuing our work and our conversations. 

^{(1)          Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” (1973) 4 Policy Sciences 155.} 

^{(2)        Senior Minister Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, “Responding to a Perfect Long Storm”, Speech delivered at the IMAS-Bloomberg Investment Conference (9 March 2022); Sundaresh Menon CJ, “The Role of the Courts in Our Society – Safeguarding Society”, Opening Address at the Conversations with the Community (21 September 2023) at para 30.} 

^{(3)         Tang See Kit, “Singapore Calls for Stronger Cooperation Between ASEAN and Gulf States” (CNA, 27 May 2025).}

^{(4)         Sundaresh Menon CJ, Patron’s Address at the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators London Centenary Conference (2 July 2015) at para 13}

^{(5)         Sundaresh Menon CJ, “The Future of Commercial Litigation: How Not to Fall Off the Edge of a Flat World”, Keynote Address at the Supreme and Federal Court Judges’ Conference (25 January 2016).}

^{(6)         Sundaresh Menon CJ, “Law Schools: A Time of New Burdens and New Beginnings”, James P White Lecture (30 October 2018) at para 37.}