KAREN POK ON MENTORING JUNIOR LAWYERS
Variety and patience are key, says the director at Altum Law.
BY ASHUTOSH RAVIKRISHNAN
As any lawyer will tell you, a legal career is littered with lessons. One that stands out in Ms Karen Pok’s mind relates to an email she had sent a client as a young associate. “I was working with a senior lawyer, also copied on the email, who sat me down the next day, showed me the email and asked me calmly, ‘Do you see what was wrong with the email?’”
Karen eventually found her mistake, a comment meant for internal discussion, which was inadvertently included in the email to the client. “And he said, ‘Good. Just make sure you don’t ever make this kind of mistake again.’” His professionalism and nurturing tone struck the young Karen, eventually influencing her own approach to managing younger lawyers she has worked with. As a director at a boutique firm, she admits that “it can sometimes be easier to just edit the associate’s work and send it off”. “But for them to learn, you should take the time to explain why things are done a certain way, identify their mistakes and what they need to look out for, which can be time-consuming … but worth it.”
Karen adopts this principle whenever she mentors the three associates who are rotated among Altum Law’s partners. The rotation is a deliberate choice, she explains. “Compare this to a situation where you work with just one partner who specialises in one particular area of work, and you end up pigeon-holed and doing only that kind of work. As someone new to the profession, you may not know what you like and what you’re good at, so breadth of exposure is invaluable in the early years,” she explains. “Even at Altum, where we do mostly corporate work, we each have niche areas. My expertise is in cross-border IPOs and M&A work, for instance, while others may be more proficient in corporate finance. It keeps the work interesting for associates. But of course, if any of them express a wish to focus on one area, we try to accommodate that as much as possible.”
And the learning goes beyond just the nitty-gritty legal work. “Once we feel they are ready, we also get them to participate in client calls as much as possible so they learn how to handle clients and are not just merely there to do the grunt work. Those are the things I had really appreciated when I was a junior associate and I want to pass it on.”
THE POWER OF PRECEDENTS
Another lesson she wants to pass on relates to precedents. To many corporate and commercial lawyers, these form the bedrock of the countless contracts they draft. But Karen says that too often, associates adopt a “kitchen sink” mentality when using them. “I’ve seen a lot of clauses that don’t really need to be there because they aren’t relevant to that particular client or transaction … but they are just left in the draft contract anyway. When asked, the response often was, ‘Because it is in the precedent’. So, you have to always ask yourself, ‘Do you really need this provision in it and if so, why and do I need to amend it according to the context?’”
Karen’s work with precedents extends to an active involvement in SAL’s database of commercial precedents on LawNet. She believes that the benefits of such an updated and current precedent bank created by lawyers-editors in Singapore are numerous. For one, it improves efficiency. “A lot of the precedent banks available to us are from other jurisdictions. If we are able to create a reliable and up-to-date precedent bank on LawNet, you will not have to check every provision to see whether it's relevant for Singapore or if it takes into account the latest legal updates or market developments here.”
There’s also the benefit of learning from leaders in the field. “Some firms that contributed to the project are known for their expertise in certain areas, so learning from their precedents will uplift standards across the profession,” she adds, in the same nurturing tone that she must have observed in that senior lawyer all those years ago. Her story goes to show that the legal world is indeed littered with lessons, and some are passed through generations.
Karen has contributed several precedents to LawNet’s repository of commercial precedents, which is available at no extra cost to existing subscribers. Latest precedents include a consignment agreement and an independent contractor agreement.
