In a lecture organised by the Law Society, the managing partner of Morgan Lewis Stamford, Mrs Lee Suet Fern, questioned if the Qualifying Foreign Law Practice (QFLP) scheme was good enough when the firms under the scheme hired ‘only about 100 out of thousands of Singapore-qualified lawyers.’

According to The Independent, Mrs Lee, the sister-in-law of the Singaporean prime minister, said that foreign law firms had taken work away from local firms.

But the Law Ministry has rebutted the claims and says that the QFLP scheme, which allows foreign law firms to practise in permitted areas of local law through Singapore qualified lawyers, has helped the city state become a regional law centre.

The Ministry said that 80 per cent of the $340m revenue generated by the nine QFLP firms was from offshore work, and this was work that could have been done elsewhere. Foreign law firms also contributed to exports of legal services worth hundreds of millions of dollars in 2014; and more than a third of lawyers QFLP firms were Singapore-qualified, with more than a quarter of partners in such legal firms being Singapore-qualified.

The Ministry also claimed that Mrs Lee’s arguments were at odds with her previous position, as she applied for a QFLP licence in 2014 and sought an exception for the firm when advised that the application was outside of the specified period.