Hou Fu Ang
Senior Legal Counsel
Legal tech writer & speaker · Alt + Counsel newsletter · Singapore
About
Senior legal counsel in Singapore who writes code at night. Built a redlining library in 2021 that ended up in Andrew Ng's DeepLearning.AI course without him knowing — now gets 240,000+ downloads a month from people he's never met. Writes Alt + Counsel, a newsletter on legal tech and AI from inside actual practice. Has contributed to the MinLaw AI Governance Guide, co-facilitated a workshop for in-house counsel, and spoken at Drew & Napier client seminars and SCCE Singapore 2026. Most legal tech coverage is too optimistic or too far from practice. Writes from the inside.
3 Projects
redlines
A Python library for comparing legal documents and generating human-readable redlines. Built in 2021 when Singapore's statutory simplification exercise needed something better than git diff. Now downloaded 170,000+ times a month on PyPI and used in Andrew Ng's DeepLearning.AI course.
data.zeeker.sg
A free, open legal data platform for Singapore — judgements, government newsroom releases, parliamentary replies, and legal news, all queryable via SQL or downloadable as CSV, JSON, or SQLite. Built and maintained solo because Singapore's legal data deserved better infrastructure than copy-pasting from government websites. Runs lean on purpose: the architecture fits in a side project budget without sacrificing reliability.
blog-alt-counsel
A Claude Code agentic workflow that automates the full lifecycle of a blog post — from pitch to published. Built for Alt + Counsel, it runs five phases: pitch, write, review, post, and verify. The review phase uses three synthetic personas (a legal technologist, a solo corporate lawyer, and a lawyer-coder) to audit drafts before anything goes live. The thing that writes the blog is itself a project worth showing.
Media Appearances
From Law to Code: My Unexpected Journey into Open Source
GeekcampSG
A talk on how a corporate counsel became an accidental open-source maintainer after building a Python text-comparison tool for Singapore’s 2020 statutory revision — and what he learned about reviewing code, empathy for contributors, and why lawyers should get involved in open source.
2026 in Focus: Navigating a Changing Legal and Regulatory Landscape
Drew & Napier LLC
Guest speaker on AI governance and incident response, covering a three-part framework for robust AI use policies, response protocols, and safe operational practices.
Alt + Counsel
Alt + Counsel
Blog and newsletter documenting what actually happens when you build legal tech at night — not success stories, but honest accounts of 150-hour projects with zero users and the infrastructure vs. tools framework that emerged from them.
Philosophy
"Infrastructure and tools are different jobs — know which one you’re doing"
Infrastructure means production-grade systems with tests, docs, and long-term maintenance. Tools mean shipping focused solutions in weekends. Neither is wrong. The key is knowing which fits the problem before you start.
"Every feature is a maintenance liability you’re signing up for at 11pm on a Tuesday"
Running open-source libraries solo while practicing law full-time means saying no a lot. Not about working slowly — about building systems that don’t need constant intervention.
"Legal tools shouldn’t be locked behind enterprise paywalls"
Most legal tech is enterprise software that costs $50K or academic papers about what’s theoretically possible. There’s a gap for practical, open-source solutions that work on nights and weekends.
"Non-professional coders bring a perspective pure engineers miss"
Knowing which procedural frictions matter because you hit them every day shapes what you build and — more importantly — what you say no to.