18 ASIAN LEGAL BUSINESS – DECEMBER 2023 WWW.LEGALBUSINESSONLINE.COM COVER STORY the market. Notable examples include Setia Law, founded by ex-Rajah & Tann dispute duo Danny Ong and Wern-Jhien Yam, as well as Chua & Partners, helmed by a former co-deputy head of international arbitration at Allen & Gledhill, Chua Kee Loon. Christopher Chuah, famed construction partner at another major firm, WongPartnership, also struck out to set up his own shop. A big factor driving these new entrants appears to be an increased focus from clients on costs. “This is in response predominantly to a challenging market, and clients becoming very price-sensitive,” says Paras Lalwani, a director and head of international arbitration at Bayfront Law, which operates in a formal law alliance with Japan’s Nishimura & Asahi. Alfred Lim, managing director at Meritus Law, agrees. “When clients engage a law firm for disputes, typically they would be served by one senior partner and a team of associates. From the client’s standpoint, there’s no difference whether this setup is in a big or a smaller firm, but they may benefit from the latter in terms of cost consideration.” “Customarily, the big firms may have an advantage because they have a certain number of senior counsels, the tradition, expertise of the teams, etc. But you now have very experienced partners setting up their boutique firms, so I would imagine that the big firms will get a hit,” adds Lim. Choo thinks the exodus will likely continue, and more new firms could be in the offing. “If a big firm had lost a big rainmaking partner – like in Chuah’s case, himself a construction partner who attracts good work from international clients as well as the SMEs – there’s greater threat coming down to the remaining partners to deliver. I may be wrong, but the knock-on effect to this could be the uncertainty to some of the mid-level associates, leading to some movement next year,” says Choo. Most industry insiders see the symptoms of a growingly fragmented legal market as a proactive response of marquee partners at big outlets either aiming to tap the previously unreachable corners of the market or simply to protect the fruit of their own work from being hollowed out by a hierarchical partnership. But others believe that the end game for most of those boutiques is actually a tie-up with an international firm. “If you look at Setia Law, for example, it wouldn’t surprise me if you’d wait a little bit longer to find that’s not just a boutique Singapore law firm trying to do work for Singapore clients,” says a managing partner at an international firm in Singapore who prefers not to be named. “There is an amount you can grow, but as a two, three, four-man band, you don’t have the economy of scale to compete for really big work.” — SW “Singapore remains a magnet for foreign firms, not all of whom are looking for a slice of the existing market; some are merely following clients as part of a wider retention effort. Indeed, there is a growing number of outposts here, staffed by only a few (foreign) lawyers, with no plans to expand within Singapore.” — Jeremiah Huang, Icon Law Image: Rex Wholster/Shutterstock.com
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