Criminal trial advocacy in Singapore with the Australian Bar Association, 9 and 10 October

A day and a half of intensive criminal advocacy training, delivered by the Law Society of Singapore with the ABA.

The Law Society of Singapore's criminal trial advocacy course runs on Friday 9 October 2026 from 9.00am to 6.30pm and Saturday 10 October from 9.15am to 12.00pm, delivered in conjunction with the Australian Bar Association.

The collaboration is not new. The Law Society of Singapore Trial Advocacy Course has appeared on the ABA calendar in previous years, and the Society's litigation conference series has drawn judges, King's Counsel, Senior Counsel and ministers from Singapore and abroad for over a decade.

What cross-jurisdictional advocacy training gives you

Advocacy is taught within national habits that practitioners stop noticing. How long an opening should run, how directly a judge may be addressed, when an objection is expected and when it reads as obstruction — these are conventions rather than rules, and they are invisible until you watch someone competent do it differently.

Singapore's criminal jurisdiction is a common law system operating at high procedural discipline with judge-alone trial as the norm. For Australian practitioners, the value is in the contrast: an environment where none of the persuasive work is being done by a jury, and every technique that depends on emotional register has to justify itself to a professional decision-maker.

The timing also does something useful this year. With the World Bar Conference in Queenstown cancelled, this is one of the few remaining opportunities in 2026 for Australian counsel to train alongside advocates from another jurisdiction.

Details

Friday 9 October 2026: 9.00am – 6.30pm
Saturday 10 October 2026: 9.15am – 12.00pm
Delivered by: The Law Society of Singapore with the Australian Bar Association
Registration: Via EventNook

Check CPD recognition with your home jurisdiction before booking flights.

Who it suits: practitioners with some trial experience rather than none. Intensive advocacy training assumes you have stood up before, because the value is in the correction of habits you have already formed. Counsel in their first two years will get more from a domestic readers' or trial advocacy intensive, and can come back to this in a few years with something to correct.