A landmark four-year study released today finds that the steady loss of lawyers from private practice in Singapore is driven by the structural and cultural conditions of legal work rather than by any shortcoming in the lawyers themselves, and that meaningful change will require coordinated action across the whole legal ecosystem, including firms, clients, the courts, and the institutions that educate, admit, and regulate new lawyers.

The Anthro-LawSoc Legal Profession Sustainability Study, commissioned by The Law Society of Singapore and conducted by people insights company Anthro, draws on 31 in-depth interviews totalling 38 hours, with former judges, legal academics, practitioners across firm types, and lawyers who have left, alongside a survey of 855 practising and former lawyers. It pairs statistical modelling with thematic analysis of what lawyers said in their own words, so that each headline finding rests on both numbers and lived experience.

The study was prompted by the late Mr Adrian Tan, President of the Law Society until 2023, who warned in his 2022 Opening of the Legal Year address of a "perfect storm" facing young lawyers as record numbers left while fewer entered the profession. In 2021, 538 lawyers did not renew their practising certificates, a 30 per cent rise on the year before. The problem of attrition in Singapore’s legal sector is decades old.

The release and completion of the Anthro-LawSoc report are timely. At the Opening of the Legal Year in January 2026, it was announced that the Minister for Law and the Chief Justice would co-lead a committee to address lawyer attrition and the impact of artificial intelligence on the profession. This study offers an independent, profession-wide evidence base precisely when the profession is resolved to act.

A: HOW LEAVING A FIRM IS NOT THE SAME AS LEAVING THE PROFESSION

The study set out to understand why lawyers leave, and its central finding is that the reasons why lawyers leave their firm are not the same as those for leaving the profession altogether.

“What drives lawyers out of a firm is, above all, the everyday experience of working there, what the study calls workplace culture: not feeling safe to speak up, not feeling genuinely supported by their immediate boss, and sensing that the firm has little regard for their life outside work. These cultural factors explained far more about lawyers’ attachment to their firm than their wellbeing did.

What drives lawyers out of the profession altogether is, above all, poor mental health. It was the clearest warning sign that a lawyer was losing their attachment to a legal career, and a major factor behind the intention to leave law for good. Nearly 36% of those who responded to the survey experienced anxiety at moderate or severe levels, and nearly 19% of respondents reported symptoms consistent with moderately severe and severe depression.”

The two are linked. The study suggests that a poor culture wears down mental health over time, until leaving practice starts to feel like the only option. That connection carries a hopeful message: improving culture yields a double return, easing the pressures that push lawyers out of their firms now and protecting the wellbeing that keeps them from leaving the profession later. The authors of the report are careful to say this is a well-supported pattern rather than firm proof of cause and effect, and that confirming it would mean studying the same lawyers over time.

The report is equally clear about what it has not set out to answer, and flags two priorities for future research. The first is why lawyers stay, which is a different question from why they leave: understanding what positively anchors lawyers in the profession, especially those who have practised for many years and report high wellbeing, would complete the picture. The second is who enters the profession in the first place: because admission still rests largely on academic ability, which only weakly predicts the qualities most central to sustainable practice, such as resilience, interpersonal skill and ethical reasoning, future work should test whether broadening how students are selected changes who stays and thrives over time.

B. THE FINDINGS POINT TO AN ECOSYSTEM, NOT A SINGLE CULPRIT

A consistent message across both the survey and the interviews is that the conditions driving attrition are produced by many actors. The pressures cascade: court timelines set deadlines, client expectations set intensity, billing models shape boundaries, senior practitioners set norms, and law schools shape what new lawyers expect. The headline findings below are organised by the stakeholders best placed to act. (see Report pp. 48-109)

1. Firms and supervisors: the largest lever within the profession's own control

The strongest firm-controllable predictors of commitment were organisational support and care, a family- and life-supportive environment, and supervisory stewardship (see Section E for brief definitions of terms). The interviews put flesh on the numbers: lawyers repeatedly described leaving bad managers rather than hard work, and reported incivility and bullying, especially in firms without proper HR infrastructure, together with an intergenerational pattern in which mistreated seniors pass the same treatment down. Junior lawyers reported more than double the incivility of their senior colleagues. Multiple junior lawyers independently called for whistleblowing channels and consistently enforced standards of conduct.

2. Clients: expectations that set the tempo of overwork

Client demands surfaced in the interviews as a primary driver of the always-on culture: an expectation of round-the-clock availability, work intruding into annual and medical leave, and large firms matching the hours of international counterparts in New York, London and Hong Kong, with some lawyers describing 80-hour weeks as normal. This connects to the survey, in which workload and time pressure were significant predictors of lawyers’ intention not to renew their practising certificates and to move in-house. The report frames reasonable boundaries on availability as a conversation the profession must have with clients, not something individual firms can resolve alone without risking competitive disadvantage.

3. The courts and the judiciary: pressures that lie beyond any single firm’s control

The interviews with practising lawyers and former judicial officers point to court practice as a source of pressure that lies outside any individual firm’s control and can limit the reach of firm-level wellbeing efforts. Several described a timeline culture introduced in the 1990s to clear case backlogs as having continued after those backlogs were addressed, with disposition-rate targets at times appearing to weigh more heavily in scheduling than the circumstances of individual cases. Some lawyers recounted difficult interactions with the bench and noted that inflexibility around timelines can present more challenges for practitioners in litigation. A number of junior lawyers said they had been encouraged to steer away from litigation practice. The interviews also pointed to the value of a clear, safe channel through which lawyers could offer feedback on timeline and interaction practices, which the report suggests would help surface and address such concerns constructively.

4. Revisiting the goals of legal education: preparing lawyers for a changing craft

Younger lawyers showed markedly higher job-search activity and greater interest in in-house roles. The report argues this reflects how junior roles are structured, premature specialisation, dependence on a single supervisor, and narrow exposure, rather than a generational lack of resilience. It locates part of the response upstream, in how lawyers are formed: a persistent gap between academic preparation and practice that no single institution can close. This thread runs directly into artificial intelligence. As AI absorbs the routine, document-heavy work on which juniors have traditionally learned the craft, the report argues that law schools may need to revisit the goals of legal education itself, shifting from producing graduates who can perform tasks that AI can complete with superior efficiency to broader goals of judgment, professional identity, and adaptability.

5. The profession as a whole: a wellbeing baseline that should concern everyone

Cutting across every stakeholder is the state of lawyers' health. Around one in five lawyers met the criteria for severe anxiety, and close to one in five reported symptoms consistent with moderately severe or severe depression. Fewer than half rated their physical health positively, and roughly three-quarters fell short of basic exercise and sleep guidelines. Distress was concentrated among junior lawyers, who scored substantially worse on the study's mental-health measure than senior lawyers, and reported lower psychological safety.

C. WHAT THE STUDY RECOMMENDS

A consistent message across both the survey and the interviews is that the conditions driving attrition are produced by many actors. The pressures cascade: court timelines set deadlines, client expectations set intensity, billing models shape boundaries, senior practitioners set norms, and law schools shape what new lawyers expect. The headline findings below are organised by the stakeholders best placed to act. (see Report pp. 110-122)

The study turns its evidence into five strategic considerations and is emphatic that there is no single fix. What works depends on where a given firm’s problems actually lie, and some problems sit beyond any one firm to solve. It also suggests a sequence for firms that want to respond to the call: make workplaces psychologically safe and address harmful supervisory behaviour first, because no other effort succeeds on unsafe ground, then strengthen the firm-controllable supports, and pursue the longer-term, profession-wide reforms in parallel rather than waiting on them.

1. Diagnose before prescribing: start with the firm’s own data

Culture explains anywhere from a quarter to well over half of engagement outcomes across professions, but every firm’s situation is different: some struggle mainly with workload while supervision is strong, others have a reasonable workload but little organisational support. That variation is why copying another firm’s solution, even one that worked elsewhere, is risky. The study urges firms to begin with a baseline survey of the dimensions it found consequential: organisational support, psychological safety, work-life support, supervisory relationships, workload, incivility, and mental, physical, social and financial wellbeing, using validated measures, then prioritise where the weaknesses actually are and re-measure after acting. This cycle of measuring, acting and checking is what the report means by managing on evidence rather than intuition.

2. Treat sustainability as a shared responsibility: act across the ecosystem

An honest internal diagnosis will also surface problems a firm cannot fix on its own. Court timelines, billing models, client expectations, profession-wide norms of conduct, and the transition from education to practice are all shaped beyond any single firm, making sustainability a collective responsibility. The study calls for coordinated action among courts, firms, clients, the Law Society, academic institutions, and regulators, and, in particular, for explicit conversations about reasonable timelines and the legitimate boundaries of a lawyer’s availability, and for closer alignment between how law schools teach and how practice actually works.

3. Redesign the early years: structured exposure before specialisation

The study reads junior lawyers’ restlessness as a design problem, not a character flaw: they are asked to commit to a practice area before they have had any real chance to learn what different kinds of legal work involve day to day. It contrasts with medicine, where structured rotations expose trainees to several specialities before they choose one, and argues for broader early foundations, rotations, and later specialisation. This is also where artificial intelligence enters: as AI absorbs the routine, document-heavy work that juniors once learned, the report argues that law schools may need to revisit the goals of legal education itself, shifting from tasks that machines now perform towards judgment, professional identity and adaptability.

4. Build mentorship into everyday work

Real development, the study notes, happens when junior lawyers work alongside seniors on substantive matters, get feedback in real time, and take on greater responsibility under guidance, which organisational scholars call developmental work experiences. A mentorship scheme bolted onto the working day does not, on its own, change how work is assigned or how seniors treat juniors. Embedding mentorship in the culture means evaluating and rewarding senior lawyers partly on how well they develop talent, treating that development as valuable work rather than a distraction from billing, and enabling honest upward feedback, which is only possible where juniors trust that candour will not be punished.

5. Measure wellbeing as seriously as money

Mental health is the factor that most determines whether lawyers stay in the profession, yet many firms still manage wellbeing on impressions rather than data, often layering on wellness programmes whose effects are never measured. The study argues for the same rigour firms apply to their finances: regularly measuring mental, physical, social and financial wellbeing with validated instruments, ideally administered independently so that people answer candidly. It singles out financial wellbeing because lawyers who feel financially strapped cannot escape a poor environment by moving, which is how a bad culture holds on to unhappy people. With measurement in place, a firm can tell whether an intervention is actually working rather than merely assuming it should.

The strongest firm-controllable predictors of commitment were organisational support and care, a family- and life-supportive environment, and supervisory stewardship (see Section E for brief definitions of terms). The interviews put flesh on the numbers: lawyers repeatedly described leaving bad managers rather than hard work, and reported incivility and bullying, especially in firms without proper HR infrastructure, together with an intergenerational pattern in which mistreated seniors pass the same treatment down. Junior lawyers reported more than double the incivility of their senior colleagues. Multiple junior lawyers independently called for whistleblowing channels and consistently enforced standards of conduct.

D. THE LAW SOCIETY'S RESPONSE: A TASK FORCE ON THE FULFILMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY OF YOUNGER LAWYERS

(see Report pp. 110-122)

Following the completion of the study, the Law Society has convened the Task Force on the Fulfilment and Sustainability of Younger Lawyers to examine the findings, assess their implications, and develop practical, profession-wide recommendations for the Council's consideration.

The Task Force is co-led by Ms Charmaine Yap and Mr Darryl Chew, Co-Chairpersons of the Law Society's Young Lawyers Committee, and draws members from across the profession, including lawyers of all seniority levels in private practice and in-house roles, academia, and members who have served in the Judiciary and the Attorney-General's Chambers. Taking a collaborative, inter-generational approach driven by younger lawyers in consultation with senior members, its work is organised into five workstreams that mirror the study's evidence: workplace culture and supervisory conduct; the measurement of wellbeing and mental health; early-career structure and exploration, including legal education, rotations, delayed specialisation and billing models; mentorship as an embedded professional practice; and broader ecosystem and structural reform, including court timelines, billing practices and client expectations. The Task Force will engage stakeholders, including the Ministry of Law, the Judiciary and the Singapore Academy of Law.