The Anthro-LawSoc Legal Profession Sustainability Study, released in June 2026, is the first time Singapore has had its own empirical data on bullying and harassment in the legal profession. The findings are significant – not just for law firms, but for professional services more broadly.
Our partner Corinna Lim has written a detailed response to the report. She draws on her experience as a lawyer, as Executive Director of AWARE Singapore, and on Catalyse’s work with professional services firms across Singapore and the region. She sets out what the report reveals and what law firms and firms across professional services can learn from it.
The Anthro-LawSoc Legal Profession Sustainability Study, released this month, is an important piece of work. Rigorous, honest, and long overdue. The legal profession has grappled with these issues for years, but until now Singapore has had no empirical data of its own to ground the conversation.
It is not easy for a profession to look this honestly at itself. The voices in this report – junior lawyers describing what they have endured, senior lawyers reflecting on a culture they inherited and passed on – deserve to be taken seriously.
I write as someone with a particular connection to this subject. I practised law for about ten years, in a large firm and later in a small firm which I helped to manage, before spending sixteen years as Executive Director of AWARE, where workplace harassment was one of our central concerns. Through AWARE’s Workplace Harassment and Discrimination Advisory, I provided emotional and practical support to women who had been harassed at work, including, on a number of occasions, lawyers.
I now lead Catalyse , working with organisations across Singapore and the region on workplace fairness, investigations and training, with a particular focus on addressing workplace harassment and bullying. The legal profession is one I care about deeply.
The loss that does not need to happen
Some attrition is inevitable. The work is demanding, the hours are long, and it is not for everyone.
But it is a different thing entirely when lawyers who love what they do, who came into the profession with genuine commitment, leave because of how they are treated. That loss is avoidable.
The findings on mental health are striking: nearly 36% of respondents experienced moderate to severe anxiety, and nearly 19% reported symptoms consistent with moderate to severe depression. Junior lawyers fared substantially worse than their seniors across every measure. Poor culture erodes mental health over time. The two cannot be separated.
Singapore is not alone
Bullying and harassment in the legal profession is not a new concern. The International Bar Association’s (IBA) landmark ‘Us Too?’ report in 2019 gave global shape to what many already knew. Drawing on nearly 7,000 respondents from 135 countries, it confirmed that the profession’s hierarchical structures, its culture of deference to seniority, and the absence of HR infrastructure in many firms created conditions where mistreatment could thrive.
Reading it, I found myself reflecting on Singapore. We were excluded from the jurisdiction-specific analysis due to insufficient data. But there was little reason to think we were exempt from the same dynamics. The Anthro-LawSoc study now gives us our own data, and it confirms those concerns.
The IBA found that approximately one in two female lawyers and one in three male lawyers globally had been bullied in connection with their employment. It also pointed to structural reasons why the legal profession is particularly vulnerable. The profession has very hierarchical structures, with lawyers highly dependent on powerful partners. This creates a sense of impunity. Senior management tends to take a light approach to bullying because high performers are allowed to continue with their success, leading to norms that are not fit to address the problem.
These structural conditions are not unique to any one country. They are features of how legal practice has been organised for generations. What the Singapore study adds is empirical confirmation that they apply here too.
What the Anthro-LawSoc findings show
The study measures incivility specifically – dismissiveness, exclusion, humiliation, behaviour that tells people they do not matter. The findings are sobering.
Junior lawyers experience incivility at more than double the rate of their senior colleagues: a score of 20.53 for juniors against 9.91 for seniors on a validated scale of 0 to 80. In larger firms, the numbers are higher still: firms of 31 to 100 lawyers averaged 20.44, compared to 10.80 in small firms of one to five lawyers.
Incivility is not the same as a tough working environment. It is a specific pattern of behaviour, and it compounds over time. It erodes the person it targets and the people around them. The report also documents an intergenerational transmission effect. Senior lawyers who were themselves mistreated have often come to see that treatment as normal, even formative. What was endured becomes what is inflicted. The cycle perpetuates itself unless something actively interrupts it.
The report is clear on one point that deserves to be stated plainly: this is not a generational failing. The narrative that young lawyers today are less resilient than those who came before misreads the evidence. When every generation of senior lawyers has criticised the one behind them for decades, the pattern points not to recurring weakness but to structural flaws that have remained unchanged across generations.
What has changed is the environment around those unchanged conditions. Thanks to technology, junior lawyers are on call night and day, operating at a pace previous generations did not face. And the current generation is, as the Law Society President noted at the Opening of Legal Year 2022, “brave enough to speak openly” about mental wellness and sustainability in a way previous generations were not.
Being unwilling to suffer in silence is not the same as lacking resilience. What has changed is not the character of the people entering the profession – it is their willingness to name what previous generations quietly endured.
This points to something the report identifies as a central structural problem: the accountability gap. Senior lawyers who cause harm are often protected by their seniority and the revenue they generate. Junior lawyers facing a harmful supervisor have a binary choice: silent endurance or career-threatening confrontation. Most choose endurance, and eventually leave.
It is not a junior versus senior story
This is not a story about bad senior lawyers and suffering junior lawyers. It is a story about a system that is not working well for anyone.
The report is direct on this. Many lawyers promoted to partnership on the basis of technical legal excellence have received no preparation for managing people – creating systematic capability gaps that directly harm junior lawyers’ wellbeing and retention. When partners and senior lawyers manage their own stress by unloading on subordinates, it creates cascading psychological burden throughout the hierarchy, with each level experiencing amplified rather than mitigated pressure from above.
Senior lawyers are often transmitting stress they are themselves receiving from clients, from billing models, from firm leadership. The report notes that even lawyers in supportive firms report that court timelines, client expectations, and billing models create pressures that no individual firm can eliminate alone. And profit maximisation, the report finds, systematically overrides sustainability initiatives, preventing reforms that might affect revenue.
This does not excuse harmful behaviour. But it does explain some of it. The starting assumption has to be that most people – junior and senior – are trying their best within a system that makes that harder than it should be. Breaking the cycle requires investment in both directions.
Junior lawyers need to be equipped – to understand what they are entitled to expect, to raise concerns in ways that can be heard, and to navigate difficulty without either staying silent or escalating without first attempting to resolve it.
Senior lawyers need the management skills they were never given, recognition for good supervision and not just good billing, and space to raise their own concerns.
The conversation should not be about who is to blame, but rather what the profession needs to build together.
What the Law Society has done
The Law Society deserves credit for what it has already done in this area. Over the past five years it has progressively built up its framework: a Workplace Harassment Resource Guide, a Pledge signed by twenty-one of Singapore’s largest law firms in 2020, and most recently Guidance Note 3.16.1 on the Prevention of Workplace Harassment and Bullying, issued in October 2025. Notably, the Guidance Note requires that complaints be investigated regardless of the seniority or appointment of the perpetrator – a direct statement that no one is above accountability.
What firms can do - and why moving early matters
Firms that care about talent and retention should take the lead. There is concrete work they can start on immediately, and the case for moving early is clear.
Firms known for treating people well have an advantage in recruitment, in client relationships, and in building stable, high-performing teams. Junior lawyers are increasingly discerning about where they work, and they talk to each other.
The Workplace Fairness Act comes into force at the end of 2027, and there is no better time than now to act. Firms that build genuine grievance processes, reporting channels, and fair treatment standards in the next two years will not be scrambling to comply at the last minute. The work they do now serves both purposes.
Policy is the starting point, but how it is written matters. A purely legalistic document focused on definitions and procedures will not serve the people who need to use it. Good policy is sensitive to the difficulty of coming forward, impartial in how it handles what follows, and clear about how both parties will be treated with dignity throughout.
In our experience, many policies do not provide enough practical guidance to those who have to manage the process – the supervisors receiving concerns, and the people tasked with investigating them and imposing disciplinary measures. That gap is where things go wrong.
Training should cover everyone – lawyers and non-legal staff at all levels. The firm coming together around what is acceptable and what is not is itself a statement: the same standards apply regardless of seniority or billing contribution. Beyond that, managers need to know how to receive a concern without making things worse, and complaint handlers need to know how to run a fair process that both parties can trust.
In our work with professional services firms, we have seen cultures shift. It happens through policy improvements, sustained communications, accountability and training. It requires genuine commitment from leadership. But when that commitment is real, things change.
A profession-wide mechanism - care and consequences
Firm-level action is necessary but not sufficient.
Through AWARE’s Workplace Harassment and Discrimination Advisory which ran for five years, I found that complainants valued having an independent, confidential external party to turn to – one that offered both emotional support and practical advice, with no connection to their employer. Junior lawyers in small firms need exactly that.
The infrastructure for this is closer than it might appear. The Law Society already operates the Ethics Assist Helpline, a confidential helpline launched in June 2024 for lawyers to seek guidance on ethical issues in a less formal way. And the Legal Practitioner Support Protocol (LPSP), recommended by the January 2025 Ethics and Professional Standards Committee Final Report and accepted by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, is a peer support mechanism not yet implemented, which means its scope is still open.
Neither was designed with harassment in mind. But both could be. A modest extension of Ethics Assist could allow a lawyer experiencing incivility or harassment to call in and receive initial guidance on their options. The LPSP, if designed broadly enough, could serve as a listening and referral function for lawyers who have been affected – offering early support to lawyers who may not yet know what their options are.
Ontario’s Law Society offers a useful model. Its Discrimination and Harassment Counsel programme is a free and confidential service available to any lawyer who has experienced or witnessed discrimination or harassment. It listens, clarifies the issues, explains options, and can offer mediation where both parties agree. It has no investigative powers. Its value is in being a trusted first point of contact that stands entirely outside the firm.
Singapore already has the bones of something similar. Extending what exists would be faster and more practical than building something new.
On consequences, the data from comparable jurisdictions is sobering. Ireland’s Dignity Matters survey found that reporting resulted in no sanctions for those responsible in 88% of bullying incidents and 89% of harassment incidents. The most common reason people gave for not reporting was the status of the person who caused the harm.
Guidance Note 3.16.1 requires investigation regardless of seniority. That is the right standard. The question is how it is enforced. A guidance note without a follow-through mechanism is a statement of intent, not a guarantee of accountability.
Other jurisdictions are grappling with this. The ACT Law Society in Australia has stated plainly that “members of the profession are expected to report any inappropriate behaviour they come across in the course of legal practice“- framing reporting as a professional obligation, not a personal choice.
Under section 83(2)(h) of the Legal Profession Act, a lawyer may face disciplinary action for conduct “unbefitting an advocate and solicitor as an officer of the Supreme Court or as a member of an honourable profession.” That is a broad standard. A lawyer who persistently behaves in ways that Guidance Note 3.16.1 now explicitly prohibits is, arguably, falling short of it. The Law Society should make that connection explicit.
The bigger picture
Some of what needs to change will take longer: court culture, billing models, the pipeline from law school. The Anthro-LawSoc report is clear that these require an ecosystem response, and they will involve many stakeholders over many years.
The report is candid that profit maximisation has systematically overridden sustainability initiatives. Changing that requires more than goodwill. It requires the profession to collectively decide that it values people as much as it values revenue.
But the incivility and accountability piece is different. It is within reach. It requires firms to be honest about where they are, clear about what they expect, and willing to hold those expectations regardless of seniority or revenue. It requires a support mechanism that affected lawyers can actually reach – and real consequences when things go wrong.
The Law Society has laid significant groundwork. The Anthro-LawSoc study has given the profession a clear and honest account of where things stand.
The lawyers in this report were brave enough to say what many have known for years. They deserve a response equal to that honesty.
If your organisation would like to discuss how to build fairer, safer workplaces – in law or any other sector – we would be glad to hear from you. Reach us at enquire@catalyse.sg.
By Corinna Lim
Partner, Catalyse Consulting