Hong Kong's first Five-Year Plan, published Wednesday alongside Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu's final Policy Address of his current term, charts a course for the city's free-market economy through five years of geopolitical uncertainty by building a legal sector with real commercial competitiveness, experts said.

Underpinned by its status as the only jurisdiction under Chinese sovereignty that is practicing common law, the city’s blueprint for 2026-30 treats its common-law inheritance as strategic infrastructure, not just a professional service, as it seeks a firmer role in the nation’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30).

Legal academics say that as the city folds its legal services more tightly into the country's broader economic strategy, the plan will turn the city’s prowess in legal services into a key instrument for attracting capital, luring talent and facilitating regional commercial activity.

In his annual Policy Address, delivered right after the plan, the chief executive named the establishment of an international commercial court as the leading initiative in a chapter devoted to "deepening Hong Kong's position as an international legal and dispute resolution services center".

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The proposed Hong Kong International Commercial Court (HKICC) is billed as "the final link" in the city's litigation-arbitration-mediation three-tier ecosystem, intended to deliver "precise and comprehensive" dispute resolution for business players worldwide, according to Jose-Antonio Maurellet, chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association.

“As the bar has explained from the outset, when the Judiciary announced the setting up of the HKICC, this was an important milestone in Hong Kong's development," Maurellet told China Daily.

According to Nick Chan Hiu-fung, a legal-sector lawmaker, the plan marks a shift in register: legal services recast not merely as a civic institution to be defended, but as an instrument to scale up the city's overall competitiveness.

The plan shows Hong Kong progressively folding legal services into the country's broader economic strategy, turning law into a key instrument for attracting capital, luring talent, and facilitating regional commercial activity, said Virginia Lee, a Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area lawyer.

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Grenville Cross, the British-born barrister who served as Hong Kong's director of public prosecutions from 1997 to 2009 and remains one of the territory's most prominent legal commentators, said, "The rule of law is Hong Kong's lodestar, and is reinforced by the plan.

"Whenever disputes arise, they will be independently adjudicated upon," he told China Daily. "In all respects, the plan upholds the rights and freedoms treasured by Hong Kong people. This undoubtedly benefits the 'one country, two systems' policy going forward."

Maurellet told China Daily that under the Basic Law, Hong Kong has "preserved and maintained" the entrenched international dimension of the legal profession, with Cross himself standing as prominent evidence of that continuity.

"In addition to our strong and independent Judiciary, which is for the most part made up of former barristers practicing in Hong Kong, the Judiciary will benefit from a wide pool of leading judges and silks from our wider common law family," Maurellet said.

That infrastructure is not negligible: Hong Kong tied with Singapore as the world's second-most-preferred seat of arbitration in the 2025 International Arbitration Survey, and the Department of Justice is amending the Arbitration Ordinance within the year.

The plan aims higher still. Hong Kong is separately pursuing the Rome-based International Institute for the Unification of Private Law — marking its centenary this year — as the city seeks to have the institute open its first overseas liaison office in Hong Kong.

Chan said it is "historic and strategic" for the city's law-and-dispute-resolution sector to convert its robust rule-of-law tradition into top-tier competitiveness, translating its institutional strengths into a growth impetus across the jurisdiction and beyond.