Conferment

The C C Tan Award

This speech by President, Mr Philip Jeyaretnam, SC, is in honour of Mr Joseph Grimberg, SC, upon being conferred the C C Tan Award for 2007

The C C Tan award was inaugurated in 2003 by the Council of the Law Society.

The award is named after the late Mr Tan Chye Cheng, or C C Tan as he is fondly remembered by the Bar.

Mr C C Tan was the first elected President of the Law Society and a founding partner of the law firm of Tan Rajah & Cheah.

For members of the profession who had the privilege of knowing Mr Tan, he had throughout his long professional life embodied and exemplified the virtues of the legal profession - honesty, fair play and personal integrity.

The C C Tan award is presented by the Law Society to honour a member who exemplifies these highest traditional qualities of the Bar.

Our recipient this year was called to the Singapore Bar on 4 October 1957.

He started his career at Drew & Napier.

In the early days of his career and hardly four years at the Bar then, he came face to face with the late Edmund Barker, former Minister of Law, when he represented the plaintiffs in the case of Thomas Cowan & Co Ltd v Orme.
Then at the age of 29, he was made the first Singaporean partner of the firm and five years later was appointed as Senior Partner in 1967.

The 'awesome prospect' of shouldering this responsibility at the age of 33 came about as one after another, senior partners opted for retirement to return to England so as to be close to their families, prompted by the new ideas of responsible parenting that were starting to take root during that period.

Needless to say, he rose to the occasion and superbly managed the firm for the next 20 years.

Then in 1987, at the age of 54, feeling 'the time had come', and to make room for the younger generation of the firm whom he had groomed, he accepted the offer of the post of Judicial Commissioner of the Supreme Court of Singapore.
Two years later, he rejoined Drew & Napier as a consultant. Today, he is a senior consultant with the firm and is also highly sought after as an arbitrator.

One highlight of his illustrious law career was representing the President of the Republic of Singapore in a Constitutional Reference where an issue of interpretation of the Constitution was referred for determination. This is the only case of its kind so far referred to the Constitutional Court. He also represented the families of two deceased passengers in the Cable Car Inquiry in 1983.

For his personal integrity, honesty and outstanding contributions to the law community in Singapore, we are pleased to present Senior Counsel Joseph Grimberg with the 2007 C C Tan award.

Acceptance Speech by Mr Joseph Grimberg, SC

Thank you Philip, and members of your Council for this Award. I am honoured, and very touched. It's a great way to start bringing the curtain down on a long, very satisfying and moderately successful practice.
The qualities for which Mr C C Tan stood, and which he exemplified, are not difficult to achieve if one avoids the hazards. The three main hazards, in my opinion, are greed, acquisitiveness and disinclination to work. You see the results of these flaws everyday when you open your newspaper. Some of them are close to home. Each year two or three bad eggs, members of this Society, bring shame and embarrassment to our profession, such as when a lawyer buys jewellery with a sackful of money that doesn't belong to him.

If I deserve this Award, then the credit is largely down to some highly talented people of excellent character who walked through the doors of Drew & Napier, and became my pupils or protégés. I needed them for their intelligence, industry and energy. They needed an example. It was a mutual need. We kept each other's standards up. The relationship of master and pupil is far from being a one-way street. It is central to the training of a good lawyer. If I possess the principles for which I have been so amply rewarded today, I owe it to my pupil master, an Englishman scarcely older than me.

Mr President, it's probably not my place to say this because I still hold a practising certificate, but I respectfully suggest that you and your hard-working and innovative Council, and the rest of us advocates and solicitors, are fortunate to be in practice at this time. I say this because, in my opinion, in all the 50 years that I have been a lawyer, the administration of justice has never been in more intellectually competent, more efficient, more fair-minded and safer hands, than it is now. Much of that is down to the Chief Justice, and to Chief Justice Yong Pung How, a great administrator and talent spotter.

I wish you, Philip, and members of your Council, success and gratification in what remains of your year of office in this, the 40th anniversary of the Society.