About Shaun
Shaun Leong, FCIArb, is a partner at HFW in Singapore and an international arbitration specialist with close to seventeen years in complex cross-border commercial disputes. He is among the few counsel working directly on agentic AI liability - the question of where responsibility lands when an autonomous system causes loss - and is a three-time nominee for International Arbitration Lawyer of the Year, at the Law.com International Asia Legal Awards in 2026 and 2024 and the Benchmark Litigation Asia-Pacific Awards in 2022. Lexology (Who’s Who Legal) named him a highly recommended contentious artificial intelligence practitioner globally in 2026.
His AI docket is the part that bears directly on this summit. He acted for a technology company in Singapore’s first AI dispute before the Singapore International Commercial Court, over the alleged misappropriation of data used to train and develop models, and for a digital assets exchange in a high-value dispute over liability for errors made by trading systems running on algorithmic decision-making models. He has acted in AI data centre disputes, for clients across the semiconductor ecosystem including foundries, chip manufacturers and infrastructure companies, in cross-border investigations into the supply of AI chips, and on cross-border AI copyright claims - alongside advisory work on where liability sits at each stage of the AI development lifecycle.
In digital assets he was the first lawyer anywhere to obtain a worldwide proprietary injunction freezing a non-fungible token on-chain in a commercial dispute, over a Bored Ape Yacht Club asset, and he represented investors through all three of the 2023 collapses: Terraform Luna, Three Arrows Capital and FTX.
Shaun graduated with First Class Honours from the National University of Singapore and spent five years in a judicial capacity as a Magistrate and Assistant Registrar of the Supreme Court, publishing written judgments on international arbitration law. He sits on the Inquiry Panel of the Law Society of Singapore and on the organising committee for the Legal Profession Symposium 2026, convened by the Singapore Academy of Law. He is a panel arbitrator with SIAC, KCAB International, the Japan Commercial Arbitration Association and the Thailand Arbitration Centre, where he is Head of Academy, among others, and a specialist mediator with the Singapore International Mediation Centre. He spoke on the strategic management of AI risk during World Economic Forum week in Davos in January 2026, and at the UNCITRAL Colloquium at UN headquarters in New York on digital trade and finance.
Areas of Expertise
- Regulation
- Compliance
- AI
- Digital Assets
- Blockchain
