Danny Lau

Biography

Danny Lau joined BIICL as Research Fellow in 2026. Danny is a practitioner-researcher focused on legitimacy and institutional trust in AI-assisted decision-making. He is a Policy & Practice Visitor at the University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, and an Academic Visitor at St Antony's College. With over 15 years of legal experience across jurisdictions, he examines how institutional authority shifts when AI is introduced as "assistance" but becomes, in practice, increasingly determinative of outcomes, especially where humans remain formally responsible.

A central theme of his work is the threshold at which assistance becomes de facto decision: how organisations routinise and defer to algorithmic outputs, how responsibility and reasons are re-distributed across people and systems, and what governance responses are needed to preserve legitimacy. His approach is institution-centred and practice-oriented, with particular attention to accountability mapping, documentation standards, contestability pathways, and decision-record integrity.

Danny previously served as an Equity Partner and Founding Asia Pacific Digital Law Leader at Deloitte Legal, advising boards, institutions and regulators on governance and technology-enabled regulation. He is also Co-Founder and General Counsel of Home Dental Group where he leads legal, compliance and governance for AI-supported clinical workflows in a regulated setting, translating research concepts into auditable operational controls. He holds the IAPP Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional (AIGP) credential, and is a UK solicitor (England & Wales), a Hong Kong solicitor, a PRC-qualified lawyer, and a Notary Public (Hong Kong).