About this site

Most legal tech content is written for teams with enterprise budgets and dedicated IT support. I don't have either of those. So I started writing for people like me.

I'm Houfu — a corporate counsel in Singapore who learned to code because the tools I needed didn't exist at a price I could justify. What started as scripting contract workflows on nights and weekends turned into something bigger than I expected.

What I've actually built

My open source redlines library now has 177,000 monthly downloads on PyPI and ranks in the top 10% for package quality. I built SG Law Cookies, an AI-powered Singapore legal news platform. I've shipped 70+ repositories on GitHub, ranging from document automation tools to legal data APIs.

Not all of it worked. I spent 150 hours on a legal data project that got zero users — because I never validated demand. I wrote about that too.

What this site is

Alt + Counsel is where I write about what I'm building, what's working, and what isn't. Two kinds of posts show up here:

News commentary — when something happens in Singapore legal tech, I write about what it actually means for practitioners who don't have BigLaw resources. Not the press release version.

Learning in public — personal stories about building tools, making mistakes, and figuring out what resource-constrained legal teams can realistically implement. These come with frameworks you can actually use.

Every post circles back to the same question: what can a solo counsel or small legal team actually do with this?

Who reads this

In-house counsel, legal tech founders, solo practitioners, and developers — anyone building practical solutions without unlimited resources. The community spans Singapore, Europe, and the US.

What I'm still figuring out

How to make independent legal tech writing sustainable. How to build tools that serve more than just me. Whether anyone actually wants structured legal data APIs for Singapore. I don't have all the answers — but I share the process honestly, which seems to be the part people value most.

Connect

You can find my code on GitHub, read my professional background in my CV, or just subscribe and reply to any email. I read every response.