[SMULA] Professional Certificate in Legal Practice of the Future Module 2: The Business of Law and Digitalising and Streamlining Legal Operations (PCLPF)

Implementing new operation procedures often come with challenges and unexpected bottlenecks. Smart solutions, however, can make operations smoother and automated, saving time and improving efficiency in these processes for both lawyers and clients. 

This module provides useful frameworks and metrics to evaluate the performance of one's practice, as well as highlights the optimisation of a financial setup. 

This module is part of the Professional Certificate in Legal Practice of the Future. It is also available on a standalone basis.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

At the end of the 1-day module, participants will be able to:

• Reframe their firm’s business model as contrasted with a legal department
  
   
• Justify and plan for a budget from management in order to stretch the dollar and “do more with less"
  
   
• Appreciate legal operations in a digital, data-driven world and be equipped with frameworks for analysing and improving operations
  
   

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Associates with at least 1-2 years of experience
  
   
• Paralegals and Operations Managers in the legal services industry

PREREQUISITE

Participants should have at least 1-2 years of experience in a legal services firm



ASSESSMENT
As part of the requirement for SkillsFuture Singapore, there will be an assessment conducted at the end of every module. The mode of assessment, which is up to the trainer’s discretion, may be an online quiz, a presentation or based on classroom exercises.

Participants are required to attain a minimum of 75% attendance and pass the associated assessment in order to receive a digital Certificate of Completion issued by Singapore Management University.

SPEAKERS

Lee Kee Choon

Lee Kee Choon is a seasoned finance professional with more than two decades of senior financial leadership experience, mostly within the professional services sector. He started his career as an auditor with Arthur Andersen in 1997, before joining the then NYSE-listed Hewitt Associates to take on several progressive corporate controllership roles. It was a fulfilling 8-year period during which he led numerous business transformation and M&A initiatives both globally as well as within the APAC region. Kee Choon was also the CFO of Baker & McKenzie (Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia) during its high-growth phase when emerging from the Global Financial Crisis. It was this role that cemented his deep passion in practice management in the legal space.

More recently, he was the Group CFO of a regional architectural and design firm that specialises in the luxury hospitality industry. That was before he finally succumbed to the (higher) calling of entrepreneurship in 2018 to establish his CFO practice, when he joined a group of former Baker & McKenzie compatriots to set up Otter Esquire – a specialist boutique firm that provides business advisory and practice management support to law firms and other professional services setups. Currently, his team is serving a clientele of close to twenty law firms of various sizes, of which he is acting in the capacity of (outsourced) COO/CFO for several of them.

Rodney Yap
Rodney is the Co-Founder and Director of Regall Private Limited and UserTip Private Limited, and represented Singapore in the New York finals at the inaugural 2018 Global Legal Hackathon. As Regall’s director, Rodney has taken on multiple legaltech development projects and consulting projects with solution providers, law firms, and government affiliated agencies. Regall is also the first Singapore based company to provide legal design services to the market. As UserTip’s director, Rodney oversees the development and implementation of technology that is specifically designed to smoothen out the process of digital adoption. The UserTip platform is the only digital adoption platform in Singapore enabling the building of in-application guidance for solutions without the use of code.

Rodney’s prior experience also includes helping with the implementation of a legal technology solution with many local law firms of varying sizes, ranging from sole proprietors to mid-large size firms. This experience lends well to identifying potential roadblocks or pitfalls in the legal operations of a firm that would impact the effectiveness of any digital transformation efforts by the firm. Being called to the Singapore Bar, Rodney is also able to understand the requirements for certain areas of laws and how the legal operations of the firm needs to cater for certain situations.

Rodney is also an adjunct faculty with the Yong Pung How School of Law, where he specialises in teaching Legal Design and Design Thinking to both undergraduate and professionals. Rodney is 1 of only 3 Singaporean members in the global Legal Design Alliance which links professionals and researchers in the Legal Design space.