Written by Catherine Shen | Edited by Josh Lee Kok Thong
In 2025, the author visited some well-known technology giants and legal tech companies in Beijing and Shenzhen, and conducted background research of the legal tech space in China[1] as part of the trip preparation. The article summarises some key observations and takeaways from that experience. Given the size and diversity of China’s market, any generalisation should be treated with caution. Readers should keep this in mind while reading the article.
Introduction
At a panel discussion on AI governance attended by the author in November 2025, one speaker (who cannot be named on account of the Chatham House Rule) referenced the common law of business balance “cheap, good, fast: pick two” to describe divergent global approaches to AI governance. Yet this familiar business adage does not always hold true in China. From consumer goods such as running shoes[2] and electric vehicles[3] to advanced technology such as AI models,[4] Chinese companies now routinely deliver products that are affordable, high-quality and rapidly iterated. Chinese brands are no longer dismissed as cheap knockoffs and are giving their established international counterparts a run for the money.[5]
Legal tech is no exception. Traditionally, legal services (not just in China) have been conservative, risk-adverse and harder to commoditise. Thus, it would not be a surprise if the legal industry remained rooted to the cheap-good-fast trade-off. The legal profession has also been comparatively slower in technology adoption compared to most other industries, at least before the emergence of generative AI. Yet, China’s legal tech scene is vibrant for its breadth of products, technical depth, speed of execution and commercial sophistication. Several structural conditions may have made this possible.
A market that is large enough
China’s legal services market is vast. Based on official data, as of September 2025, there were approximately 830,000 licensed lawyers practicing in over 45,000 law firms on Mainland China, ranging from small local practices to mid-tier regional firms and large, sophisticated national firms.[6] Although separate statistics are not available for in-house counsel, close to 30,000 were said to be working as corporate counsel at the end of 2022.[7] The sheer volume of litigation,[8] regulatory compliance work, and commercial transactions happening daily creates persistent demand, both in the B2B market (e.g., law firms and companies) and the B2C market (e.g., individual lawyers), for tools that improve consistency and productivity.
Size matters. In smaller jurisdictions, even a well-designed product may not find enough paying users to sustain its existence. In China, by contrast, even a narrowly targeted solution can attract a user base that is sufficiently large to be commercially viable. This market potential allows founders and start-ups to experiment aggressively.
An expansive market also means diversity in demand. Small firms and individual lawyers tend to seek affordable, immediate assistance to boost productivity in mass-market legal services, while larger outfits are more willing to pay a premium for tools supporting cross-border deals and disputes. In-house teams, meanwhile, often prioritise document review, drafting and automation solutions to reduce external legal cost. This diversity creates room for legal tech products across a wide range of sophistication levels and price points.
A market that is familiar yet distinct
With the huge number of potential addressable users, it is unsurprising that the Chinese legal tech market has flourished. A simple scan shows the ecosystem spans several major product categories:
- Legal research remains foundational. These products, similar to western staples such as LexisNexis and Westlaw, existed long before the current AI adoption wave. They are usually repositories of laws and regulations, judgments and commentaries, increasingly augmented by AI-assisted natural language search, cross-referencing, translation, summarisation and Q&A.
- Contract-related solutions form another major category, covering drafting, review, clause comparison, risk identification and contract lifecycle management. Such solutions are also increasingly assisted by AI.
- Access-to-justice-related tools focus on several distinct angles, such as Q&A chatbots for the general public, evidence preservation tools using blockchain, and dispute analytics tools that predict outcomes by analyzing past cases.
- Compliance and workflow tools are also common, including due diligence tools based on business filings, and practice management systems designed for the operational side of legal work, such as document management, billing and e-signing.
While these product categories can similarly be found in most other jurisdictions, what is distinct about the Chinese market is the extent to which boundaries between these categories are blurred. Many Chinese companies offer their products as “super-apps” where users can perform legal research, contract review, due diligence and many other functions within one single interface. PKULAW.COM, a platform run by a company affiliated with Peking University and delilegal.com, a service operated by a Shenzhen-based private company co-founded by a lawyer, are two examples. Further, Chinese legal tech products are often designed to plug seamlessly into larger platforms, such as enterprise systems (e.g., company proprietary legal workflow systems) and ubiquitous applications such as WeChat. For example, the two “super-platforms” mentioned earlier can both be accessed by users from WeChat mini programs. This platform-native approach reduces user friction, lowers adoption barriers and allows legal tech tools to fit naturally into everyday workflow. Often, users are unlikely to perceive legal tech tools as standalone products that require change management or dedicated maintenance.
A market that is “cheap and good”
To develop legal tech products that are both “cheap” and “good”, Chinese companies are fortunate to benefit from strengths in both “law” and “tech”.
On the “tech” side, Chinese companies can draw from over 3.5 million STEM graduates China produces annually.[9] Many of these companies invest heavily in R&D, and employ large teams of engineers and scientists with strong backgrounds in AI, data science and applied research. Some companies generate proprietary patents and software copyrights during product development. Other companies publish technical or academic papers on industry publications. Where building a large in-house technical team is not feasible, the companies often partner with university labs or science academies to build on-demand resources that can be called upon to support in-house capabilities. This is observed in all the service providers the author visited, such as PKULAW, delilegal, TsingLex (affiliated to Tsinghua University), etc.
This technical depth is complemented by ready access to legal expertise. The size of the Chinese legal profession means that even if 1% of lawyers work on legal tech in some form, Chinese companies would be able to tap a huge pool of talents to work with. Some companies are also able to up the ante by working with law students not only for product development but to build early brand loyalty. PowerLaw AI, a legal tech company specializing in contract-related solutions, shared that they had the luxury of selecting one intern from over 100 law student applications. Chinese lawyers also appear to be more receptive to legal tech, partly because of the permeation of technology in Chinese daily life and partly driven by what the co-founder of Fadada, a legal tech company focusing on e-signing and e-contracting, described as a “sense of crisis”, i.e., the believe that if they do not join the AI race now, jobs could one day be replaced by AI. In any case, it appears that Chinese legal tech companies are finding it less challenging (than in other markets) to tap on lawyers for expertise throughout product development, from training data, shaping logic to validating outputs.
Such relatively easy access to both technical and legal expertise also helps control development costs and enables Chinese legal tech products to be priced more affordably while offering functionality comparable to overseas competitors.
A commercially sophisticated market
Another notable feature of the Chinese legal tech scene is the level of commercial sophistication and pragmatism in the conversations surrounding it. Business founders and leaders speak openly about pricing strategies and return on investment. Many have performance indicators tied to venture-based funding. For example, TsingLex mentioned that it was exploring ways to monetise the intellectual property generated during product development and that there were also financial arrangements in place with the parent university. Privately-held PowerLaw AI, on the other hand, suggested it would be more effective to target corporate clients with digital transformation budgets rather than law firms with tighter cost controls. In other words, legal tech is not framed as an aspirational or “doing-good” endeavor – although many companies began with self-funding or government grants, they must eventually “prove their worth” as commercial enterprises.
Such sophistication and pragmatism extend to global awareness. Some Chinese companies openly benchmark their performance against well-known overseas competitors (Harvey was often referred to). Some shared observations about global business archetypes and where they saw themselves in this matrix. Many were curious about how Chinese AI models are perceived internationally. For example, a frequent question was whether Chinese AI models are discriminated against outside of China. As in other technology sectors, Chinese companies often know a lot more about what is going on outside of China than vice versa.
A market that is fast (but with limits)
In a country where a hospital can be built in ten days[10] and instant retail (delivery orders completed within 30 to 60 minutes) is the new battleground,[11] speed is taken for granted. The legal tech space is similarly characterised by fast iteration. New products and features are released quickly and refined (or abandoned) through user feedback, rather than being delayed to “play safe” or in pursuit of perfection. Chinese companies appear more comfortable with embracing uncertainty, recognising that no matter how many market surveys and focus group discussions are conducted, market response can only be truly tested after product roll-out.
This speed certainly comes with limitations. Compared with international peers, Chinese companies have historically paid less attention, at least initially, to matters such as trust, safety, explainability, and risk management. A general disclaimer may be all there is. In many circumstances, this appears sufficient to domestic users because they are generally aware of the limitations of technology after years of exposure technology in daily life. The co-founder of one company visited openly admitted, for example, that the company had not “thought deeply” about issues such as data privacy.
This is not to say that Chinese legal tech companies disregard considerations such as trust and safety. These matters tend to become more prominent as products mature or when companies start to look beyond the domestic market. Nevertheless, the companies often prioritise market entry and validation, partly out of necessity given the competitive market landscape.
Beyond China
The Chinese legal tech scene, like many other Chinese consumer products, challenges the “conventional wisdom” of the inevitable trade-off between cost, quality and speed. It shows that when certain conditions, such as market size, talent depth, product integration and commercial pragmatism, are present at the same time, it is possible to achieve, or at least come close to achieve, all three qualities.
What is clear is that the Chinese companies the author visited do not appear to hold any magic wand for being cheap, good and fast at the same time. They are not doing anything new – they use the same coding language and adopt very similar technology development workflows. The difference is that they can do all these “ordinary” things at scale over sustained periods to become “extraordinary”.
The approach taken by Chinese legal tech companies may not be replicable in other jurisdictions. Nonetheless, as these companies increasingly look outward, they will inevitably start to make their presence felt more keenly on the global legal tech market. In fact, PKULaw and Delilegal are already processing Singapore law content, and Fadada onboarded Singpass, Singapore’s national digital identity, in its e-sign infrastructure at the end of January 2026. Contrary to common stereotypes, many Chinese companies are open and candid about sharing their strategies and work processes, provided that the conditions are right.
Editor’s note: This paper was submitted to LawTech.Asia as a guest contribution. The views within this paper belong solely to the author in her personal capacity, and should not be attributed in any way to LawTech.Asia. References to entities in the article are meant as practical examples, and do not indicate the author’s endorsement of any of those companies or their products. Comments on this article may be directed to catherine_shen@abli.asia.
[1] For the purpose of this article, China refers to the Chinese mainland.
[2] Justin Ong Guang-Xi, “Once back of the pack, Chinese running shoes now look to surge ahead in Singapore market”, CNA 1 August 2025.
[3] Justin Ong Guang-Xi, “As Chinese EV sales build in Singapore, BYD’s success helps open doors to other brands: Analysts”, CNA, 12 September 2025.
[4] China’s DeepSeek ranked the seventh among Google’s 2025 global trending searches. See Aisha Malik, “Gemini was Google’s top trending search term in 2025”, TechCrunch, 4 December, 2025. DeepSeek was the number 1 Google trending search for 20205 in Singapore. See Hazeeq Sukri, “SG60 voucher, Barbie Hsu and Ian Fang among top Google searches in Singapore in 2025”, CNA, 5 December 2025.
[5] Amanda Yeap, “Once seen as cheap knockoffs, Chinese brands are losing their stigma and winning over Singapore consumers”, CNA, 7 June 2025.
[6] Introduction by Minister of Justice He Rong at the press conference on “High-Quality Completion of the 14th Five-Year Plan” organized by the State Council Information Office on September 8, 2025.
[7] “Statistical Analysis of Lawyers and Grassroots Legal Services in 2022”, Ministry of Justice of China, 14 June 2023.
[8] E.g., between January and September 2025, courts across China handled over 32 million criminal, civil and commercial, as well as enforcement cases. See, “Supreme People’s Court Releases Key Data on Judicial and Adjudication Work from January to September 2025”, Press Bureau of the Supreme People’s Court, 22 October 2025.
[9] Diyaa Mani, “Top countries for STEM talent in 2025: Global rankings and trend”, Airswift, December 3, 2025.
[10] “Time-lapse shows Wuhan hospital ‘built in 10 days”, BBC, February 2, 2020.
[11] Casey Hall and Sophie Yu, “Chinese e-commerce giants make expensive bets on fast deliveries”, Reuters, May 13, 2025.