Davis Polk partner Ran Li discussed Hong Kong’s emerging role as a preferred listing destination for Chinese AI companies and the impact on the legal industry with Asian Legal Business.

The article notes that law firms will need to move beyond traditional, siloed practice areas to help AI companies navigate a landscape where financial and regulatory challenges are now completely inseparable.

“This is not about Hong Kong firms ‘adding’ a new practice area in the abstract,” Ran explained. “What’s really changing is that, for AI companies, the old boundaries between capital markets, sanctions, export controls and data regulation have basically collapsed.”

Ran added that the dissolution of “old boundaries” requires law firms to help management make real trade-offs early. That means addressing questions including how regulatory risk affects structure, disclosure and even business design – instead of treating these as compliance issues to be fixed after listing.

Ran also noted that for Hong Kong’s legal industry, this AI boom represents both challenge and opportunity. Firms must develop expertise across previously separate domains while positioning themselves as essential connectors for multiple stakeholders. Those institutions include Chinese companies expanding regionally, Southeast Asian governments procuring AI infrastructure, and international investors assessing geopolitical risks.

“Hong Kong’s advantage is not that it ‘sits in the middle’ geographically, but that it can sit in the middle institutionally,” Ran said, adding that the legal industry’s role is to “translate between those lenses” and to help Chinese companies structure outbound expansion in a way that is acceptable to local regulators, defensible to international investors, and resilient to geopolitical shifts.

“China’s AI unicorns drive new era for Hong Kong capital markets,” Asian Legal Business (March 2026) (subscription required)

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