We need to produce world-class law graduates

THE recent StarEdu article, “Training tomorrow’s lawyers” (Sunday Star, June 14; online at bit.ly/star_lawyers), highlights a crucial conversation.

However, we must acknowledge that the stagnation of our qualifying standards is holding back the Malaysian legal profession. We’re coddling a system that produces paper-qualified graduates only. They are fundamentally not ready for modern legal practice, and threaten the credibility of our legal ecosystem.

We don’t need to look far for evidence of this systemic decay. The Examiner’s Report on the Certificate in Legal Practice Main Examination Conducted in August 2025 published by Malaysia’s Legal Profession Qualifying Board paints a devastating picture of poor candidate quality. The numbers reveal explicit failure rates of 53.10% in Civil Procedure, 59.95% in Criminal Procedure, and 53.01% in Professional Practice.

Beyond these stark statistics, the qualitative failures noted by examiners are damning. Candi-dates consistently favour rote memorisation over critical thinking, display poor pleading drafting skills, exhibit a dangerous confusion over client accounts, and possess a weak command of the English language.

These fundamental issues are perennial, failing to improve year after year because our assessment methods stubbornly reward cramming over competence.

International headhunters and recruitment agencies routinely discount Malaysian lawyers’ post-qualification experience by at least half for overseas roles. Local training just isn’t considered on par with international standards. When an elite global firm looks at a Malaysian attorney with four years of experience, they often value it as only two years of true professional capacity. It’s a harsh, humiliating penalty inflicted on our best talent simply because our gateway framework refuses to modernise.

We desperately need a wholesale, root-and-branch overhaul of the Certificate in Legal Practice. It’s an outdated relic based on the old, exam-focused British Bar Finals system. A rigid framework that the United Kingdom itself abandoned decades ago.

Malaysia must demand a new qualification path modelled after the Bar Vocational Course (BVC). It successfully replaced the Bar Finals in England and Wales in 1989. The BVC wisely shifted the educational focus to continuous, practical skills-based assessments. We must stop testing raw memory and start evaluating actual professional capability. Of what use is raw memory when artificial intelligence does that so much better?

Finally, we have to implement rigorous gatekeeping criteria. We must raise the minimum entry requirement to a qualifying law degree (LLB) with at least a Lower Second-Class Honours (2:2) classification.

Additionally, a strict, high standard of English language fluency must be treated as a non-negotiable requirement. Without it, local graduates simply cannot read, understand, and execute the complex international legal work required in today’s global economy. If we want a world-class legal sector, we must demand world-class standards. There’s no more time for incremental tweaks; we need structural courage before our entire legal system falls completely behind.

CHEW KOK LIANG

Petaling Jaya

The writer who practised as a barrister at the London Bar has been a lawyer since 1999. He was also an advocate and solicitor at the Kuala Lumpur and Singapore Bars respectively and was a lawyer in Muscat, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.