Law internships

I did two major internships, one smaller one. One was with the Attorney General’s Chambers and this was because I was really just wanted to have an insight into how things operated, you know, how prosecutions were done. And they had very good structured program for internships. I spent four weeks, I believe, in AGC. They actually rotated us across different divisions that they have, and they have, I believe, six or so. But we spent most of the time in the state prosecution division and criminal justice division so we were mostly working on the actual criminal cases and we got to see how prosecutors put things together. And they actually had, you know, hands-on things that we had to do including writing, if you like, the charge paper, doing sentencing, summaries and all these things and actually going to court. They had a mock thing when we had to go to court and pretend to be prosecutors in a plead-guilty mention. So all these were very interesting and I had a very good mentor in the AGC, who actually, I think above and beyond, was trying to explain how the thinking goes in AGC and I think this is very useful now because I do criminal defense work and it helps me to see the case from the perspective of the prosecutor and it helps me to understand how the prosecution might be thinking about this case. That, I think, is a unique insight that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. The other very special internship was the Singapore Academy of Law litigation internship program, which lasted about also 4 weeks I believe. This was very special because it had an attachment to the Subordinate Court and an attachment to the Supreme Court, a short attachment to AGC, and then about 2 or 3 weeks when we were attached to a senior council. And this is really unique because you don’t get these insights and I think the best part for that was we were at the Subordinate Court, the judges were talking to us and, you know, interacting with us in a way that, I think, as practitioners, you would never have access to the judges this way. And they actually could give their point of view on many things and share what they thought were important, and not just in terms of any given case but what is important for you as a lawyer to be doing, what you should bring to the table and things like that. So that was a very unique experience. And of course tailing the senior council you get to see how he thinks and how he prepares his cases. This was yeah, good fun. These are things that, I think, the fact that it was a compulsory internship program never felt like a burden. It actually felt like an amazing opportunity.