Lawyer Adrian Tan's LinkedIn profile gives you a good hint of what he's like in person.

"Masked litigator, advocate for advocates, socially and emotionally distant law firm partner," goes one line.

"Is arguably the world's slowest driver. Keeps mentally strong and resilient by watching Tottenham Hotspur play," goes another.

"Speaks a form of Chinese not recognised or understood in China."

Lunch with the new president of the Law Society of Singapore is a laugh-a-minute affair.

It starts when he walks into the restaurant and sees me, the photographer, the video producer and two videographers.

"Is that all," he asks, straight-faced. "If you need to get more cameras, I can wait."

On Jan 1, Mr Tan, a partner at TSMP Law Corporation, took over the helm of the Law Society from Senior Counsel Gregory Vijayendran.

Among other things, the Law Society represents the interests of the legal profession and maintains standards. As president, he leads a 21-member council.

We're meeting at Chinese restaurant Xi Yan at Maxwell Chambers Suites, which is also where the Law Society's office is located.

As we settle into our chairs, Mr Tan, 56, reminds me how we had both published books around the same time back in the late 1980s.

His was The Teenage Textbook, which has been made into a play, a movie and a TV series. Mine was a decidedly less impactful collection of crime stories.

Sales stopped a long time ago, I tell him of my book. The publisher doesn't exist anymore and I'm not even sure who owns the copyright.

"Do you want to sue somebody?" jokes Mr Tan, then helpfully offers me legal advice. "You should own the copyright. That's yours and it's still valid, so you have a right to ask for your book back. You'll make a fortune."

I'd pre-ordered a Chinese New Year lunch set that starts with yusheng. The restaurant has generously given us a large serving because we are filming the dish. It comes with a mountain of salmon, maguro and other sashimi.

The waiter recites the auspicious meanings of the ingredients as he prepares the dish. Mr Tan spices things up with his own asides.

Sesame seeds to symbolise riches and wealth, the waiter intones.

"Riches and wealth," Mr Tan repeats. "It's on McDonald's Big Mac, but all right."

Peanuts for career success, the waiter continues.

"My career is peanuts," the lawyer mutters. "But we'll go with it."

Pieces of fried dough are scattered as a finale. Gold nuggets, the waiter pronounces.

We stand up to toss the ingredients. Success to the Law Society, I say. Mr Tan pushes some fried dough my way. "You're very magnanimous. I'll give you some of my gold."

Humour, you sense, is something he uses as an ice-breaker, an outlet to be creative and play with words, a way to blunt a sharp point he wants to make, and also to keep things from getting too heavy.

On the website of his law firm where each partner gives a quote to capture what he believes in, Mr Tan's is short and pithy: "Live long, laugh loudly."

That book

Although the lunch is to discuss his plans for the Law Society, we spend much of the first hour talking about something he would have previously avoided - his book.

In 1988 when he was 22 and studying law at the National University of Singapore (NUS), he wrote The Teenage Textbook, a romance set in the fictitious Paya Lebar Junior College.

I tell him I've read it has sold 50,000 copies. "My publisher says 'a lot more than 50,000', but then publishers would say that."

The book was selected by The Business Times in 2015 as one of its Top 10 English Singapore books from 1965-2015. Last year, it was in The Sunday Times' 50 Greatest Works of SingLit.

In 1997, The Necessary Stage staged a version of it. The next year, the movie on it came out and topped the Singapore box office for four weeks. Last year, the story had a new lease of life as a TV series on Channel 5.

For years, though, Mr Tan hated the mention of the book, which had a sequel, The Teenage Workbook. He says he wrote the book to tell a story about Singapore that he was familiar with and was not being told, and as a way to support himself financially.

"I didn't imagine that it would become popular. When it did, it caught me off guard. I, for a while, felt great embarrassment because I didn't want to define myself by a novel about teenagers," he says.

"I thought I'd be a great lawyer or I might write a great Singapore novel, something like John Steinbeck, George Orwell. I didn't think the subjects in my books were worthy, they were just a coming-of-age story."

When people, including his clients at work, talked about the book, he would change the subject.

But over time, he realised that his fans had grown up to become people with families and with opinions he valued - "respectable people", as he puts it.

"If they thought my book was something worth remembering, then I should change my mind about it too."

I wonder if he has made money from the spin-offs. Not from the stage play - "my reward was to see people perform the story" - or the movie, and he has yet to see any for the Channel 5 series.

Mum's influence

His parents were primary school teachers and taught English, maths and science. "It was the usual teacher romance."

They divorced later and he lost touch with his father. His mother remarried but didn't have any other children. Her second husband passed away early.

He has a brother, Edmund, younger by three years, who was a producer, director and writer with Mediacorp and helped conceive the TV character Phua Chu Kang. He now works in social media.

"He's the humorous guy in the family," says Mr Tan, leaving me to wonder what family gatherings must be like.

He grew up in a Commonwealth Close flat and later moved to Telok Blangah, Paya Lebar and Jurong.

His mother had ambitions for him and wanted him to get into Anglo-Chinese School (ACS). He remembers the night his parents returned home late after they managed to get him into Primary 1 there.

"My life was changed. I'm pretty sure that had my mother not won the ballot to get me into ACS, I'd be very different. I'd be less in many ways."

Being exposed to people from affluent backgrounds showed him what being successful was like.

His mother pushed him to do well, often telling him: "You're a teacher's son, you're my son and you mustn't lose to any of them."

He recalls how, at the end of Primary 6, pupils were gathered into a hall. A teacher went up on stage and said she was going to impart to them important lessons.

"We were like, 'Oh gosh, this is it, this is six years and finally she's telling us.' She says, 'No. 1, always open the door for a lady.' And then she went through all this etiquette."

The advice must have worked because Mr Tan is unfailingly polite, in e-mail and in person, and there's a courteous, chivalrous air about him one seldom sees these days.

After secondary school in ACS where he was a prefect ("basically I was the guy to say 'sshh' to boys in the library"), he went to Hwa Chong Junior College because it offered a humanities scholarship, then did law at NUS.

"I like debating and arguing with people. So law was a good fit. I like the idea of - it sounds very trite - helping somebody. So when you have people living next door to you and they have issues and you help them, it's nice."

He spent more than 20 years in Drew & Napier, was counsel at a technology firm for a while, and went over to Morgan Lewis Stamford before joining TSMP in 2018. He does areas like copyright and intellectual property law. Along the way, he also got a degree in computer science.

His mother died last year around Chinese New Year. She was 80 and had cancer but the end was unexpected. You sense the pain is still raw even as he says, lightly: "I wasn't a good son. I think sons are poor communicators with parents. Daughters are a lot better."

In a more sober tone, he reflects how he would always give monosyllabic answers whenever she asked about his life.

"I always got a sense that I should talk more to my mum but I never figured out how to. I spend all my time working," he says.

"Sometimes when young people talk about work and how others are and how much sacrifices they make, I think of my mum. Yeah, I think of whether if I hadn't worked as much, I would have spent more time with her. It was a lousy trade-off."

He recently penned a touching post on LinkedIn about missing her Chinese New Year meatballs this year. "I didn't really say any sort of goodbye to her, which bothered me. So I wrote about it," he tells me in a follow-up e-mail.

Mr Tan, whose wife works in the Ministry of Defence, has no children. He took to writing on LinkedIn when the pandemic broke and has amassed a good following.

He has expressed his views on issues like school admissions (alumni birthright should be banned), cigarettes (all those born after Jan 1, 2005 shouldn't be allowed to smoke), cats (HDB should not ban them in flats), and migrant workers (ferrying them on the back of lorries should be outlawed).

He sometimes prefaces his suggestions with the phrase "if I were King of Singapore", and I ask him how that came about.

Before the pandemic lockdown, he would often have coffee with friends in Raffles Place. He would invariably end up talking about how there were aspects of life in Singapore that should be changed, if only he could force Singaporeans to do so. "I would usually preface my comments with 'If I were King of Singapore, I would decree that...,'" he says.

When Covid-19 struck and he took to LinkedIn to express his views, he continued with this. "I adopted this persona in order to lighten the tone of my proposals, to show that I was speaking wistfully."

He likes how his posts have generated debate in the comments section. "People have a chance either to associate or disassociate themselves with a position, and I think most Singaporeans want that," he says.

"Most Singaporeans feel that they are confident enough to talk about this island and not be afraid and to feel that they are doing a little bit to make a change."

Turning point

Becoming Law Society president won't stop him from penning his thoughts, says Mr Tan, who was the society's vice-president from 2017 to 2020.

"I think the members elected me for who I am. I'm not the world's best administrator, or the ideal person to micro-manage operations. My strength is in speaking out, identifying issues, starting conversations, presenting a point of view and championing our profession," he says.

"If I decide, no, I must be guarded, not take a position, avoid antagonising people, then I might as well not do this job. I am an advocate for advocates, and every advocate must be fearless in order to succeed."

He sees the Law Society as being an "influencer" to promote legal literacy and law awareness, and is happy that more lawyers are writing on social media to explain concepts, not for personal gain but as general education.

He has always been big on promoting knowledge about lawyers and the law, and in fact created the Channel 5 TV show The Pupil some years ago.

The profession is at a turning point brought about by the pandemic, he feels.

His first priority is to find ways to attract and retain talent.

"There is a huge backlog of business activity that's waiting to be carried out. Singapore has to seize it. And if we don't, Hong Kong will do it, London will do it, New York will do it. People will take our lunch away, unless we move fast," he says.

In order to do this, the profession needs talented, young, energetic and smart lawyers to step up. "Our job is to find ways to inspire them."

A new generation of lawyers wants more than just remuneration, he notes. "Nowadays, an employer cannot get by with just offering money. The employer has to offer mentorship, career growth and work-life balance. The world has changed, and we have to change along with it."

His second priority is to look at how technology can improve the practice of law. The pandemic has raised issues like whether lawyers need physical offices or whether there can be virtual law firms.

"As far as we know, no major common law jurisdiction has achieved that. Maybe Singapore can be the first."

Lawyers, he says, are basically cats. Yes, cats, he repeats, when I ask him if I heard him right.

"Cats are a law unto themselves. They have opinions and they will do what they want. It's very hard to get cats to do anything unless they feel like it. Lawyers are the same. And, if it's hard to get one lawyer to do something, imagine getting 6,000 lawyers to move in one direction," he says.

"To be the president of the Law Society is to be the chief cat herder of Singapore. I'll have to entice, cajole, persuade 6,000 intelligent, independent and somewhat rebellious professionals to have a consensus and goal."

He loves being a lawyer and says with feeling: "There is no higher purpose than for one human being to speak up on behalf of another. It is difficult, but a privilege, to have the honour of telling another person's story. And that's what lawyers do."

Telling his own stories is something he also wants to do.

Before we wrap up, I ask if he will write another book. "I guess another novel is coming," he says. "There are things that I want to write about and change." And always, I'm sure, with a dose of humour.