Opening Doors: Mark Tan on Education, Opportunity, and Giving Back

When the dot-com crash reshaped the technology job market in the early 2000s, Mark Tan (JD ’06) was pursuing a software development career and found himself reconsidering what came next.

“I guess it started with a little bit of curiosity about law, so going to law school seemed like an interesting idea at the time to learn about a new field,” says Tan, who was the first in his family to pursue law as a potential career.

Two decades later, that decision has carried him across four jurisdictions and two professions. Tan is now general counsel and country head for a global logistics real estate investor, developer and operator, based in Singapore.  A role that, as it turns out, draws on the technical career he thought he had left behind.

Looking back, he connects his trajectory to a broader idea: that education can expand what people see as possible. That perspective continues to inform his support for the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (now the Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law), and particularly his commitment to creating access for future students.

Finding new possibilities

What stood out about law school, Tan says, was not the change in direction itself but the environment he encountered.

“What really stuck with me was how open and embracing the law school was,” he says. “There were a lot of us who didn’t really know what the journey would look like going forward, but the law school really opened my eyes to so many possibilities.”  In particular, the small group discussions in Property Law in his first year stood out for the way class discussions were informed by such a diverse range of viewpoints.  

That experience continues to shape his relationship with the Faculty. His support for bursaries and scholarship programs is rooted in a desire to create the same sense of opportunity for the students who come after him.

“I think the world would benefit from more people having their eyes opened in that way,” he says.

Following unexpected paths

That sense of possibility carried forward into a career defined by movement and adaptability. Tan has worked in Canada, New York, Australia, and Singapore, shifting between areas of practice and between legal and non-legal roles, including time leading IT functions within his organization.

Pulled out of training barely a few days into his career, he began his practice in commercial real estate in New York, an area he had not initially set out to pursue, primarily because of how busy the practice area was at that time.

Years later, the accident became an asset. In his current role, the real estate grounding he acquired by chance in New York sits alongside the technical background he brought to law school in the first place, in a position that draws on nearly everything he has done.

“If I had asked myself at U of T how I would get to where I am now, I would never have predicted the strange arcs that everything would take,” he says. “But if you’re open to opportunities, new possibilities can present themselves.”

Rather than following a fixed trajectory, he credits his legal education with two enduring principles: a commitment to doing work well, and the flexibility to adapt as circumstances change.

“Whatever you’re doing, do it with excellence,” he says. “But also be flexible. Life has a lot of opportunity to do different things and you can’t always force what you want, but you need to recognize opportunities when they come.”

That second principle, he suggests, is becoming harder to treat as optional. Tan has watched a technology reorder a profession from the inside once already; the wave that pushed him out of software is now arriving at the door of the one he moved into.

“The practice of law is changing so much with AI and changes in the business of law,” he says. “Being able to take a wider view is extremely important.”

Staying connected and giving back

Despite a global career, Tan says his connection to the Faculty has remained a constant thread, often surfacing in unexpected places as he meets other graduates around the world.

“I’ve always been amazed at how often I come across another U of T graduate,” he says. “There’s always a connection you can build on, and the reach of U of T is global.”

His giving is more deliberate. Tuition has risen sharply since he graduated, and the students most likely to be deterred by the number are often the ones with no one at home to tell them the degree is worth it.

“If I can do something to help someone receive an education they might not otherwise be able to access, that really makes me happy, and I am happy to give back to an institution that has given so much to me.”

For Tan, giving back is about ensuring that future students at Jackman Law have access to the same kinds of opportunities that opened new doors for him.