The President's Column

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

Happy Lunar New Year and Gong Xi Fa Cai!  I hope everyone has had a great start to the year.  

The weeks since our 40th year anniversary events in late November have raced by.  To those of you who joined us for the 15th RAIF Conference, our annual Commercial Arbitration Symposium, and our 40th Anniversary gala dinner, thank you for your resounding support.  There was a strong feeling of camaraderie that week among Singapore-based members and friends and we were reminded of our growing constituencies of international members.  It is a tremendous encouragement that so many of you travelled to Singapore to attend. 

SIArb is the product of the cumulative efforts of its volunteers over the decades and has come a long way. This includes the outstanding work of our Secretariat team, led by June Tan, which has also made enduring contributions to our organisation for the recent third of its lifespan.  Our Secretariat has a tough job as it supports our ever growing committees of volunteers brimming with ideas.  They work tirelessly in the background and have helped our past and present Councils raise standards of our activities and events over the years.  During covid in particular, June and her team played a major role in ensuring that we continued to be able to deliver our annual training programmes in alternative formats and at a high standard.  Indeed, many of you have singled out June to me and others for praise and we should not forget the many less well known members of the team handling membership administration, finance, IT and marketing, whom we have also treated as part of the SIArb family.  

As mentioned in the speeches at our 40th anniversary, SIArb expects to continue to pursue initiatives that seek to raise the value of association for our members.  We are committed to adding to and enhancing our already popular training courses.  As covid recedes and travel picks up, we will do our best to accommodate an increasing number of requests for joint activities with other international arbitral institutions.  

We announced in November that SIArb has donated a gold medal prize for one of the NUS law school’s postgraduate arbitration programmes as a way to commemorate our 40th anniversary.  In this connection, and through our new Young Practitioners Network, we hope to expand our outreach to younger lawyers and to our next generations of leaders.  SIArb welcomes your ideas and suggestions for what other initiatives your Council should be exploring.

We wish everyone a safe, happy and prosperous Year of the Rabbit and look forward to our next opportunity to meet.

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

SIArb was established in 1981 by 25 founder members and crossed its 40th milestone last year.  Our mission remains largely the same today – to serve as a national body to promote arbitration, train and accredit arbitrators, as well as organise lectures, courses and social events for our members, working in collaboration with likeminded organisations.

Although SIArb began in 1981 with a modest group of 25 non-lawyers and lawyers, it enlarged its membership to 79 by 1982 and grew to 600 members by its 25th year in 2006.  Today, we have just shy of 1,000 members and a more cosmopolitan mix of members than ever before, with high local and international demand for our training and accreditation services.  SIArb is one of the key stakeholders in the arbitration community in Singapore and contributes regularly to arbitration developments.

40 years for a volunteer organisation can be said to be more significant than 40 years in the life of a person in that it is only possible through the public service and sacrifice of all those who have come before us.  There is therefore much to commemorate, to celebrate and to be grateful for.

Council has been considering for some time different ways to commemorate the occasion – including to hold a gala dinner – essentially a party – for our members and friends to congregate.  Due to pandemic restrictions, we could not do this in 2021 but are looking forward to doing so in late November this year.  The electronic flyers have started being circulated so many of you will know that there will be three related events.

First, our popular annual Commercial Arbitration Symposium on 29 November 2022 (Tuesday), which is making a comeback after a 2 year hiatus, again in the old Parliament Chamber at the Arts House.  

Second, as the Chair of the Regional Arbitral Institutes Forum (RAIF) in 2022, SIArb is hosting the annual RAIF Conference on 30 November 2022 (Wednesday) as a pre-event of our gala dinner.

Third, our 40th Anniversary Gala Dinner will be held in the evening on 30 November 2022 (Wednesday) in the Fullerton Hotel ballrooms. We are honoured that Minister Edwin Tong, Minister for Culture, Community and Youth and Second Minister for Law, has agreed to grace our event and we have already started to receive reservations from colleagues and friends from the region and from further afield so we expect to be fully booked. Please do not leave your interest too late. We encourage those of you who would like to support the events to please book your tables or seats early. Our Secretariat will assist you with this as well as any interest in sponsorship.

In addition, our committees have been busy ramping up a series of in-person events from August 2022 because we fully appreciate that members would like to meet in person after a long break. A summary of these upcoming events is set out below and I look forward to meeting many of you there.

Meanwhile, before we meet to celebrate our 40th, to those of our senior members and members who have been involved in SIArb since earlier years, please do feel free to reach out to me, to Council members, or to our Secretariat to share your anecdotes or observations about what SIArb has meant to you or how SIArb has impacted your professional life. Many friendships have been forged through volunteering and serving with SIArb over the decades. We would like to find an appropriate way to document our collective memories and to record our collective thanks for the contributions of the many who have served before.

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

I hope everyone is in good health! “Living with covid” has new personal meaning for me as I write this note on day four of my first experience of being covid positive. While I still feel quite uncomfortable, I’m thankful that the symptoms aren’t deadly like Delta and I certainly look forward to fully recovering soon.

In our planning for 2022 and beyond, Council has been working hard to explore new modalities for organising courses, events and activities to engage with members (both local and overseas), including predicting what our programming would look like post-pandemic.

For instance, given that our events now also draw an audience from overseas members and non-members, we will explore the extent to which we continue to hold virtual-only events or lectures; and, as the cost of holding hybrid-events come down, we will explore this as an option for some of our more significant or popular activities, including our courses.

In this connection, last week’s announcement in Singapore of the easing of safe management measures has been particularly timely because Council is in the middle of planning the timing of major in-person events for later this year.

One key event to look forward to is our popular and much-missed Annual Dinner, which will also serve this year to commemorate SIArb’s 40th milestone. We are presently looking at a date in the last week of November so please look out for an early save-the-date flyer as we would expect tables to be relatively in demand this year. Our activities committee is also excited about making this year’s dinner a more special and memorable one.

Our CPD and arbitration bar committees are also working hard to bring back the ever popular annual arbitration Symposium this year – in-person, and at the old Parliament Chamber if possible. In addition, as SIArb is chair of the Regional Arbitral Institutes Forum (RAIF) this year, we are exploring possibly triple billing the Symposium, a RAIF event and our 40^th anniversary dinner, so that our members and our friends from overseas RAIF institutes have more to look forward to when they converge in Singapore.

Finally, global events such as the War in Ukraine, volatility of energy and commodity prices, global inflation, and restructuring of supply chains remind us that we are living in a time of disruption. As arbitration practitioners, we have to be alive to these issues because they will impact our practices directly and indirectly. SIArb’s Beyond Arbitration Lecture series was inaugurated a few years ago precisely so that our members can engage with topics that extend beyond arbitration alone. This year, we are pleased to be hosting Mr Bilahari Kausikan as our speaker. As many of you may know, he is a former Permanent Secretary and Ambassador-at-Large at the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has served as Singapore’s ambassador to Russia and to the United Nations. He is also an academic and delights at the monicker “Singapore’s undiplomatic diplomat”. We are honoured that Bilahari has agreed to speak with us Beyond Arbitration and he will certainly be a provocative and engaging speaker. We hope to put out some publicity on this soon so please look out for it too.

Meanwhile, please keep well and I hope we can see each other at an in-person Members Night gathering soon.

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

It is customary in December for this column to be an opportunity for reflection, gratitude, and optimism. While 2021 has been another long and difficult year for so many of us, and Omicron raises new uncertainties of the moment, we still have much to be grateful and thankful for.

While we have not been able to meet in person yet to celebrate SIArb’s 40th year milestone, we are thankful that SIArb has nevertheless continued to adjust well to the pandemic in 2021.

Over the past two years, Council has made a concerted effort to invest in infrastructure and expertise to ensure that SIArb can adaptably take its activities completely online whenever necessary.

Thanks to the hard work of our Education Committee led by Chia Chor Leong and our Secretariat led by June Tan, our flagship Membership and Fellowship courses and exams continue to be in high demand and can now be fully conducted in a virtual and online format. We will continue to invest in getting more adept at this, take in your suggestions for improvements, and focus in 2022 on developing new continuing education resources for arbitrators since this lies at the heart of SIArb’s mission.

Without question, SIArb training and accreditation is now one of the most recognised and sought-after badges in the regional international arbitration community. This is an achievement that we can all be proud to be associated with and your Council will continue to invest in ensuring that we safeguard the inherent value that has been built up by successive Councils over the decades.

In 2021, in lieu of being able to meet in person, we conducted two annual lectures online (our Annual Lecture with Lord David Neuberger addressing a global virtual audience on the impact of unilateral state sanctions on international arbitration practice, and our Beyond Arbitration Lecture with His Excellency the Honourable Will Hodgman, Australian High Commissioner, addressing us on the urgent issue of climate action and his experience of steering Tasmania to achieve net-zero emissions).Ironically, we were able to reach larger and wider audiences. As the curtain raiser for Singapore Convention Week 2021, we co-organised the inaugural Asia Pacific Institute of Experts (APIEx)-SIArb conference which focused on the role of experts in international arbitration. Although we have had to postpone our annual commercial arbitration symposium in the Old Parliament Chamber for a second successive year, we will continue to keep a look out for suitable hybrid formats to engage with our local and international members during 2022.

Our Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Committee led by Andrew Pullen organised ten ever popular monthly CPD webinars, among which, one focused on guiding our younger members on building sustainable careers in international arbitration. The popularity of the latter prompted Council to establish a new Young Practitioners Network for 2022, steered by Cathryn Neo, to focus on the needs and interests of our more junior members.

Our Activities Committee led by Tan Weiyi and Rebecca Tai Andersen worked hard to innovate ways to engage with our members remotely, organising our first virtual members’ drinks night, which turned out to be one of our most successful and memorable events of the year, as well as a seminar which focused on mindful wellness in our hectic professional lives. While we were not able to hold our annual dinner in 2021 to celebrate our 40th year, please keep watch for developments as our 40th Anniversary Committee, led by immediate past president Dinesh Dhillon,shall be looking to do so in 2022 if all goes well. Just recently, the committee closed the year with its annual debate – on the motion “This House believes that the received wisdom that litigation practice is the best foundation for a successful career in arbitration should no longer be so readily received.” As before, the debate was provocative yet entertaining and a fitting end to the year’s programmes.

Council worked hard over the year to deliver a much-needed and long-planned constitutional review. Thank you to the Constitutional Review Committee led by Ramesh Selvaraj and Andy Pullen as well as to all our members who participated in the Town Hall, who gave feedback on drafts and who attended at the 7 December 2021 EGM to support and pass the amendments.

We are also pleased to announce that the next issue of the Singapore Arbitration Journal should be on your desks. This well-received publication has become yet another flagship of SIArb that we can be proud of. Many thanks to our General Editor Mohan Pillay, Editor Chan Leng Sun SC, Publishing Editor Yeo Boon Tat, our journal Advisory Board and Assistant Editors for the hard work they have invested into laying this foundation that we are all proud of.

Finally, I would like to congratulate all the new Council members who were elected to office at the 2021 AGM and to record a personal note of thanks to our immediate past president, Dinesh Dhillon, for steering SIArb so ably over the past four years to such a strong and stable footing. I am pleased to introduce you to the new Chairs of the various SIArb Committees for 2021-2022:

On behalf of your Council, I wish you all a healthy, restful, and happy New Year!