Dear general counsel/ corporate counsel/ compliance officer,

Do you have a persistent pain-point or non-value-added repetitive tasks as corporate counsel or compliance officer but do not have the budget nor staff bandwidth to create a solution? Would you like to learn more about some upcoming lawtech and regtech solutions first-hand, and at the same time assist the next generation of aspiring legal and compliance professionals to better prepare for their 21st century careers… all for free?

LITE Lab@HK is pleased to collaborate with legal and regulatory compliance Ecosystem Partners to offer community members a unique opportunity to participate as project partners with HKU law students who will use legal design thinking, agile methodology and computational thinking through no-code/low-code document automation platforms to co-design and create proof-of-concepts with organisations addressing real-world issues, without any cost.

LITE Lab@HKU is a new interdisciplinary and experiential programme led by the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Law in conjunction with the Department of Computer Science to foster law, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship (LITE) to nurture future talent in the legal and compliance profession and to grow the Hong Kong legal innovation and lawtech/ regtech ecosystem.

Launched in 2019, LITE Lab@HKU is led by founding executive director Brian Tang, who was previously corporate counsel at Credit Suisse and executive committee member of Hong Kong Corporate Counsel Association (as ACC-HK then was), and organizer of Hong Kong’s first legal hackathons: LegalRegTechHack in conjunction with Global Legal Hackathon (where the top Hong Kong team has won the global finals in New York). Students from LITE Lab@HKU have won Georgetown Law’s Iron Tech Lawyer Invitational 2020, and Brian is a founding steering committee member of Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association, co-chair of the Regtech Committee of the Fintech Association of Hong Kong, and co-author of the State of Legal Innovation in Asia-Pacific Report 2020 and of the ACC- Eversheds Asia-Pacific survey report on digital transformation and leadership of legal counsel in the New Normal.

For the 2021 semester starting in January, LITE Lab@HKU is launching a new course called LITE Lab: Lawtech & Regtech Sandbox to enable students using legal design thinking, agile methodology and computational thinking through no-code/low-code document automation platforms to co-design and create proof-of-concepts with organisations addressing real-world issues, and LITE Lab@HKU is proud to collaborate with our Ecosystem Partners to offer its community members this unique opportunity to participate.

With the initial focus on document generation and workflow automation processes, you do not have to be worried about sharing confidential information – we would love to collaborate on the templates and/or processes in your organisation that you believe can and should be automated. Our students are using increasingly well established document automations tools from our Lawtech/Regtech Partners such as Checkbox (used eg by Coca-Cola Amatil in-house), Josef (used eg, by Clifford Chance Automation Academy) and Documate (used eg, by Wilson Sonsini summer associate training). Many of these tools are designed to be DIY, and also can be used by other corporate departments in your organisation. The students are not interns, and especially given the current pandemic,  meetings with students will likely be held remotely.

Some internal self-help and/or external document examples you may consider include:

- commonly used template documents (eg, NDAs, employee letters, legal declarations);
- legal intake and triage automation (eg, compliance, procurement, FAQs); and
- corporate approvals (eg, document review processes).

We want our students to work on the documents that matter to you and your organisation!

There is no charge to organisations for the co-design and student creation of the proof-of-concept: if you like the student project deliverable and want to use it, we would be pleased to introduce you to our relevant Lawtech/Regtech Tech Partners for you to discuss a subscription to their SaaS platform. Otherwise, you would have learned more first-hand about some of the up-and-coming lawtech/ regtech technologies available and assisted to help give meaningful projects to our law students. In either case, there no further obligations and it is a win-win solution for all without any cost !

If you are interested in participation as a project partner, please complete our online questionnaire by Thursday February 4 (extended).

Please note that:

(a)  neither LITE Lab@HKU students nor instructors are licensed to provide legal advice in Hong Kong nor elsewhere, and any work project or communication should not be construed as legal advice nor relied upon as such;

(b) neither LITE Lab@HKU students nor instructors are licensed to practice law, and so you do not enjoy any legal professional privilege regarding information shared with LITE Lab@HKU, its students or instructors by completing this firm. Accordingly, please do not share any confidential information in this online questionnaire which you would be uncomfortable with our student class knowing about; and

(c) LITE Lab@HKU desires to extend its impact and grow the legal innovation and lawtech/ regtech ecosystem in Hong Kong and beyond, and project partners should be prepared to agree with the students to have some aspect of the student work project and/or a case study to be shared on the LITE Lab@HKU website.

If you have any questions, please feel to contact Brian Tang at bwtang@hku.hk with the title "LITE Lab @HKU - Lawtech/ Regtech Application".