Singapore LawSoc Study: Bullying Reported Across All Career Levels — Professional Cost of Speaking Up Remains Too High

The Singapore Law Society's Legal Profession Sustainability Study — released June 23 and debated in Parliament this week — drew on 855 practising and former lawyers and 31 in-depth interviews with former judges, academics, and practitioners, and found that toxic workplace patterns including incivility and bullying were reported consistently across all levels of the profession, from trainees to senior lawyers. Personal health and mental wellbeing were among the strongest factors associated with lawyers leaving private practice; lawyers are leaving due to workload, inadequate supervision or mentorship, inflexible court timelines, and punishing deadlines — a finding consistent with Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon's earlier statement that one in three new lawyers may quit within three years. Singapore's Minister for Law Edwin Tong told Parliament that formal frameworks alone are insufficient because "for many lawyers, the professional cost of coming forward may feel too high, and that is a concern we should look closely into." The systemic governance implication for firm leaders outside Singapore is the universality of the finding: the cultures that produce retention failure are structurally driven — by caseload design, supervision ratios, and incentive structures — not by individual character failures, and addressing them requires operational change rather than wellbeing programming layered on top.