We're bringing The Lawyer Guide to Singapore
For the past few months, I've been splitting my time between Oslo and Singapore. Now I can finally talk about why.
The Lawyer Guide is launching in Singapore in September 2026. It's our fifth market after Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and the US, and honestly it's the one I'm most excited about. Not because it's the biggest, but because Singapore might be the market where what we built makes the most sense.
Quick background - We started The Lawyer Guide in Oslo in 2020 with Erling Løken Andersen. The idea was simple. Legal services should work the way hotels and restaurants already do, with verified client reviews, structured profiles you can actually compare, and a way to reach the right lawyer without guessing. Norway proved that works. We took the same model to Denmark, Switzerland and the US, adjusting the sales approach for each market but keeping the same core product: a free profile for every lawyer, a paid tier for the ones who want better visibility and customization, and reviews written by real clients.
Why Singapore made sense to me
Singapore ranked third out of 182 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, and it has held a spot near the top for years. That is not an accident. It comes from decades of building institutions around verification: audited numbers, licensed professionals, and public bodies that take accuracy seriously.
The legal profession here runs on that same standard. Singapore's rules on how lawyers can advertise themselves are detailed and strict, built to keep public information about a lawyer accurate and free of exaggeration. That is a high bar, one of the highest I have come across in any market we operate in, and it is exactly why I wanted to bring The Lawyer Guide here. A platform built around verified reviews and real profile data is not an unusual idea in a market like this. It is close to the baseline expectation.
That is also why launching here was never something we could rush.
About the data published
A directory only works if the information on it is right, and in a market that holds itself to this standard, there is no margin for getting that wrong. If a practice area is outdated, if a review is not real, if a detail on a profile does not match reality, that is not a small mistake here. It is the kind of thing that costs trust immediately, and trust is the entire product.
So before we published a single profile, we built our process around getting the data right first: sourcing lawyer information from verifiable, licensed records, structuring it consistently, and putting a real verification step between what we collect and what goes live. We would rather launch with fewer profiles that are fully accurate than a large database with gaps we have to explain later.
Just like for most countries, being registered as a lawyer is a publicly available information that anyone can check online. We base our sourcing on this.
We also checked our own subscription model and outreach practices against Singapore's rules before writing a single email, for the same reason. Our subscription model fits within the existing publicity rules for lawyer advertising. Our outreach plan follows Singapore's Spam Control Act, which works on an opt out model: we can contact a business without asking first, as long as the message is clearly labelled, gives a working way to opt out, and actually stops the moment someone asks.
None of that makes for exciting reading. That's kind of the point. I would rather do this slowly and correctly than announce it loudly and have to walk something back later.
On the AI search question
I get asked a lot whether this is really about AI search now, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all of that. It's part of it. More people are asking an AI assistant who to call instead of typing a search query, and those tools tend to pull from sources they judge to be structured and credible. A directory with verified reviews and clear practice areas is exactly that kind of source.
But I won't tell you we can guarantee a lawyer shows up every time someone asks an AI tool for a recommendation. Nobody can honestly promise that, and I don't want to be the guy who oversells it. What a complete, verified profile does is improve the odds. That's it. In a market where lawyers themselves aren't allowed to overstate results to their own clients, I think that's the right way to talk about what we're offering too.
If you're a lawyer in Singapore
We'll be live in September 2026. If you want to be part of the first wave, write to singapore@thelawyerguide.com and let us know. Everyone who reaches out before launch gets a free trial of Premium once we go live.