On December 13, 2025, the Silicon Valley Legal Tech Frontier Community held its fifth in-person event of the year — a Shanghai session dedicated to young legal professionals — at White Magnolia Plaza in Shanghai. Nearly 60 lawyers from top firms, in-house counsel at foreign companies, and legal-tech practitioners gathered for an in-depth exchange on the question, "Where should young legal professionals go in the AI era?" The event was led by Helen Fan, a California-licensed attorney and the community's founder. The conversation kept building in intensity and ran for nearly three hours.
Unlike the earlier Beijing session, which leaned toward macro trends, the Shanghai event focused more on the practical level — and especially on the frontline, real voices of young legal professionals. Throughout the discussion, one quiet but very real question kept surfacing:
As the mature growth path for young lawyers quietly narrows because of AI, how should they plan their own development in the AI era?
Zheng Wei: Finding Your Position in a Stratified Legal Market
Zheng Wei — founding partner of Xingye Law Firm, former partner at Tiantong, and co-founder of iCourt — began with the overall structure of the legal-services market, going straight to a change many young lawyers are living through but struggle to articulate.
He broke the legal-services market into three tiers. At the very top — bespoke, non-standard work such as Supreme Court litigation and large-scale M&A — AI can only assist with basic tasks, and the lawyer's creative thinking remains irreplaceable. But in the middle segment (such as high-volume compliance review) and in the "sinking" market of lower-value services (such as disputes under RMB 30,000), the room for AI is enormous.
He noted in particular that second- and third-tier cities may become the breakout point for "AI + law," because the knowledge and rules in those markets are more standardized and better suited to technology adoption.
Zheng emphasized that everyone can become a creator — distilling the rules of your own work and building your own small tools is the core of responding to change. A young lawyer's central anxiety shouldn't be "fear of being replaced by AI," but "fear of falling behind the wave." As AI grows more capable, the more valuable you are, the more valuable you become.
Shi Yuhang: From User to Creator — Finding Opportunity in Pain Points
Shi Yuhang — a law PhD from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a partner at Hui Ye Law Firm — drew on his combined background in computer science and law to share a practical path for "AI practice that starts from the pain points of the work."
In his early days participating in legal-tech hackathons, he was so often asked about cybersecurity-law questions by colleagues that he set out to build his own knowledge base. After AI took off, he developed — based on his own needs — a platform for tracking changes to online terms ("Terms Dock") and an advertising-compliance review tool, some of which are already profitable.
Shi pointed to an advantage that young lawyers often overlook: they're on the front line, carrying the most repetitive and trivial work, and so they know better than anyone which steps are inefficient, awkward, and exhausting — which is precisely where a tool fits best.
He stressed that AI has already dramatically lowered the barrier to building: even without knowing how to program, you can now assemble tools through natural-language interaction. He encouraged young people to "use AI a lot, and use it thoroughly" — pushing a tool to its limits is how you find its boundaries, and how you build distinctive competitiveness in the process.
Roundtable: Three Topics, New Possibilities for Young Lawyers
After the keynotes, the community invited friends including Chen Huiyu (founding partner, Shanzhang Law Firm), Wei Dongdong (partner, Hui Ye Law Firm), legal-tech founder Chen Chu, and Siber Li (product advisor, Andu AI) to join the audience for a roundtable on three themes: "AI's restructuring of legal work," "the new opportunities AI creates in the legal industry," and "building the core competitiveness of young legal professionals in the AI era." The atmosphere was electric and sparked no shortage of new thinking.
Audience participation ran high, with several practitioners sharing their own experiences using AI: one young lawyer described building a contract-review tool from scratch; an in-house counsel raised the practical confusion of deploying AI tools across a multinational company. The group went deep on questions such as recommendations for globally-adaptable legal-AI products, new business models for "AI + legal services," and the core bottlenecks to getting products into real use.
Given the length, we'll publish a separate write-up of the roundtable segment — stay tuned!
Closing: Amid the Chaos, There Is a Ladder
To close the event, community founder Helen quoted a line from Game of Thrones: "Chaos is a ladder."
In the AI era there's no ready-made career path. Young legal professionals don't have to wait for someone else to build a ladder for them — they should walk their own road through exploration.
The event ended warmly, with a group photo and a chant of "Go, Silicon Valley community!"