The book Looking Back, Moving Forward is "a book of recollections and reflections, of perceptions and perspectives." The major part of my work for this book involved interviewing various people, from partners to the despatch person. It was an interesting exercise and did indeed reveal a consistency in their experiences, which highlighted that the firm did have a unique organisational culture, one that had brought it to the pinnacle of the country's legal fraternity.
The book's totally black cover with silver lettering is stark and simple, and so is the layout. Each chapter is a collection of articles on selected individuals. At the core of it all were, of course, the two people who had been instrumental in the firm's development, i.e. founder Datuk Mohd Zaid Ibrahim and managing partner Chew Seng Kok.
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Datuk Mohd Zaid Ibrahim
Chew Seng Kok
Datuk Zaid related how ZI "began as a one-lawyer show, with one secretary and one office staff member, accepting any kind of work. Then, the Malaysian government embarked on its privatisation programme and the firm got a foothold in the North-South Expressway project. ZI teamed up with a London City firm and had sufficient work to take in a few lawyers."
Chew Seng Kok told of how he chose to move "from the world's largest legal firm to one that had about nine lawyers on its payroll, preferring to leave behind a large, private, corner office with a view of Singapore's waterfront to take up one corner of ZI's open-plan office, which was by then situated in the Bank Pembangunan Building on Jalan Sultan Ismail." He did it because he bought into Zaid's vision to build up ZI into an international-class legal force.
And they succeeded. In the process, the firm attracted some brilliant people, all driven by a common purpose and governed by the same values.
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