The Collaboration with other Law Firms

As you know under the SMU system, all students are supposed to do ten weeks of internship and that's very important for, it's important I think for all students but it's particularly important for law students because it enables them to see what actually happens in real life. The internship fair, we had twenty-six firms of lawyers, including the government legal service and the Attorney General's office who came and had stands and talked to people, it would be second-year students who'll be the main group. You can't do internships in the first summer or at least they don't count. So most of the internships were done either between the second and third year or between the third and fourth year. 

And this is an opportunity for students to make contacts. So far this has been very successful, I mean that the people have got internships that, the internships were undoubtedly one of the major factors in determining whether you get a training contract and if you, under the Singapore system, after you have a law degree, you have to pass through two more stages before you become a lawyer. You have to, there's another exam, which is not done by the universities, there's a course for that which will take six months. Then you have to do six-months training contract. So you can't get to be a lawyer if you can't find somebody who'll give you a training contract. Experience shows that successful internships are the best way to get training contracts. And so far the first cohort seems to have done very well in getting training contracts. A lot will depend on how well the first cohort get on when they're actually doing the training contract and when they actually get jobs. If they make people feel that SMU law graduates are okay, this will be a big forward step, yes.