Singapore Chief Justice: "Poor Mental Health Was the Strongest Predictor of Weakening Attachment to the Profession"

Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon's opening address at Singapore's Legal Profession Symposium 2026 (July 29) is the most empirically grounded judicial statement on lawyer wellbeing published this year. Drawing on the Anthro-LawSoc Legal Profession Sustainability Study and the Young Lawyers' Survey, he identified five structural pressures that cumulatively produce chronic stress, burnout, and anxiety: the intensity of legal work — amplified by technology that makes lawyers accessible "at any hour, by seniors and by clients"; incentive structures that hold young lawyers accountable for billable targets, client development, and fee recovery "without adequate support or guidance, despite having limited control over work allocation"; workplace culture; leadership and mentorship failures; and differing generational expectations. The study's headline finding — that poor mental health is the strongest predictor of weakening attachment to the profession — means that retention and wellbeing are not separate problems: a firm's mental health environment is a leading indicator of its attrition rate. "A lawyer worn down for long enough, stops asking whether to change firms, and starts asking whether to remain a lawyer at all." The address was simultaneously a structural diagnosis and a governing document: the Chief Justice and the Minister for Law co-lead a new Future of the Legal Profession Steering Committee, with a Sustainability and Wellbeing workstream mandated to "rethink how legal work is structured, supervised and valued."