My final week in Hong Kong brought together many of the different roles I had taken on throughout the LIA. I helped lead our second Street Law workshop at a private secondary school in the New Territories, continued casework and Healthcheck planning with Justice Without Borders (JWB), and had conversations with other legal aid organizations that further complicated my understanding of access to justice in Hong Kong.
Our second Street Law workshop was designed to introduce high school students to the legal system and make it more accessible and engaging. We first explained the general structure of the Hong Kong legal system before moving into two case simulations, one criminal and one civil. Students alternated between acting as clients and counsel, which allowed them to experience the legal process from different perspectives rather than simply hearing a lecture about it. I was proud of how the workshop translated an unfamiliar subject into something students could actively participate in. It also required a different style of leadership from my first workshop: rather than addressing adults about a specific practical problem, we were trying to make the legal system approachable and interesting to students who had little prior exposure.
At JWB, we also reached an important stage in the Healthcheck project. By this point, we had largely finalized the plans for the next, larger co-creation session, which would include both Indonesian and Filipina migrant domestic workers. Although I would have already left Hong Kong by the time of that session, I was glad that the work I had contributed to the survey design and first Healthcheck could be carried forward by the organization. This was a useful reminder that leadership does not always mean seeing a project through to its final outcome. Part of my responsibility was to leave behind work that others could continue developing.
The most challenging experience of the week came through the long-running abuse case I had been working on with another intern. As we continued constructing the client's narrative, we identified several inconsistencies. My instinct was to pause and clarify these discrepancies with the client before continuing to build the case narrative. The other intern was understandably hesitant because she had already invested significant time in the existing narrative, so we brought the issue to our manager.
The conversation revealed a much more complicated situation. The client had very limited English and few resources, making him particularly vulnerable to misinformation and contributing to difficulties in accurately communicating his own history. At the same time, the case had already been dismissed and refiled multiple times, leaving very little room to repair the narrative at this stage. This experience forced me to think carefully about the relationship between accuracy, advocacy, and the circumstances in which a client is trying to tell their story.
The situation tested integrity, humility, accountability, and justice. I felt responsible for raising concerns about inconsistencies because continuing with information I believed might be inaccurate could undermine the case. At the same time, I learned that identifying a problem does not necessarily mean there is a simple way to fix it. The client's inconsistencies could not be separated from the language barriers, limited resources, and power imbalances that shaped his ability to navigate the legal system in the first place. The experience made the inherent power disparity in migrant domestic worker cases much more visible to me.
It also changed how I thought about what it means to be an effective advocate. My initial instinct was to treat the inconsistency as a problem that needed to be corrected. After speaking with my manager, I understood that the more important question was why the inconsistency existed and what constraints had shaped the client's ability to present his story. Humanity and integrity therefore had to operate together: the legal record needed to be accurate, but accuracy could not be pursued without understanding the conditions under which the client was communicating.
On my final day in Hong Kong, I also spoke with three interns from Equal Justice, another legal clinic with a broader client base than JWB. All three were ethnic minorities from African or South Asian backgrounds, and hearing about their experiences gave me another perspective on access to justice in Hong Kong. We discussed how different ethnic minority communities can become relatively insulated from one another and from the broader institutions around them, including the government and legal system. Their experiences helped me understand why some legal problems may not reach formal intervention until significant harm has already occurred. Distrust, unfamiliarity with institutions, and limited access to resources can all affect whether someone seeks help in the first place.
The leadership values most visible this week were bravery, curiosity, and humility. Raising concerns about a case narrative required me to be brave, particularly when another approach had already involved substantial work. Curiosity helped me look beyond the immediate inconsistency to understand why it existed. Humility was necessary to recognize that my initial interpretation was incomplete and that the people with more experience working with the client had important context that I did not.
My primary leadership capacities were people and process. The Street Law workshop required me to engage students and facilitate an unfamiliar subject in an accessible way. The casework required careful attention to process and documentation, while also requiring sensitivity to the person behind the documents. I felt most stretched by having to make judgments when there was no clearly correct solution.
One behavioral adjustment I will take from this experience is to raise concerns early while remaining open to explanations that I may not initially understand. In future collaborative work, I want to be willing to question an existing approach without assuming that my first interpretation of a problem is complete. I will continue to workshop integrity and humility, particularly when accuracy, advocacy, and a client's circumstances appear to be in tension.
As I left Hong Kong, I realized that one of the most important lessons of the LIA was that access to justice is not simply about whether legal rights exist on paper. It also depends on whether people can understand those rights, trust the institutions responsible for enforcing them, communicate their experiences, and access the resources necessary to act. Across my work with Street Law and JWB, I saw different ways organizations try to bridge those gaps, while also seeing how difficult it is to overcome the structural conditions that create them.