Champerty, professional legal ethics and access to justice for impecunious clients: Law Society of Singapore v Kurubalan s/o Manickam Rengaraju: Legislation and case notes

Due to her colonial history, Singapore has inherited the English common law prohibition against maintenance and champerty. Maintenance refers to the officious intermeddling in litigation. Champerty is a particular form of maintenance where one party agrees to assist another to bring a claim such that the former shall receive a share of what may be recovered in the litigation. Public policy concerns against champertous agreements in Singapore remain due to their potential for abuse by lawyers and the consequent adverse impact on the legal profession and the administration of justice. The High Court in Kurubalan has carved out an important exception to the prohibition against champertous agreements, namely that a lawyer may act for an impecunious client knowing that he would likely only be able to recover his appropriate fees or disbursements in the event the client succeeds in the claim or obtains a costs order against the other party. Whilst the imperative to maintain access to justice for the impecunious client and to encourage pro bono work amongst lawyers cannot be gainsaid, more clarification on the scope of the exception would be welcomed. The ultimate question of legal reforms, i.e. whether we should permit lawyers to enter into conditional and/or contingency fees in Singapore involving as it were the complex interaction of multiple concerns from the community, government agencies, professional and industry, should lie within the province of the Parliament rather than the courts.