Statistical Analysis: Court representations by different law firms in Hong Kong

As stated in the Basic Law, Hong Kong residents have the right to be represented in court. To have legal representation, there are plenty choices of law firms in the market. Some (bigger) firms perform more court representations than the others. Who are they? Let’s find it out.

This analysis is based on the daily cause lists published by Hong Kong Judiciary. Information shown in the cause list includes date and time, courthouse, case number, parties, judge and the representing lawyer.

The analysis period is from 18 March 2019 to 7 January 2021, a bit over 21 months. During the period, the scraped hearing list data could be found at https://github.com/ylchan87/HKCourtList . (Note: cases from Labour Tribunal, Small Claims Tribunal, Coroner’s Court and Obscene Articles Tribunal are somehow excluded in the database.)

First, let’s look at the number of court proceedings recorded during period:

There are a total of 398,774 court proceedings recorded in the database. We can see that in Feb and March 2020, there were abnormally few number of cases heard in courts. It was the…