AlphaBits Venture Partner
AskLawyer.vn
A legal services platform for foreign nationals, foreign investors and foreign-invested businesses in Vietnam. It runs in English by default, with Vietnamese alongside. Clients answer structured questions about their situation, and licensed lawyers at Công ty Luật Liên Minh Tâm Phúc take the case from there. We co-built the platform and its architecture.
Vietnamese law is hard to navigate from outside
Foreign investors and expats in Vietnam deal with rules that change often and are written in Vietnamese. A first consultation tends to start with an unclear scope, an intake process that differs from firm to firm, and a language gap, whether the question is about a visa, setting up a company or sending profits abroad.
General-purpose AI chat is risky here. It can make up legal answers, and no lawyer stands behind what it says.
Guided pathways and a lawyer back office
Instead of an open chat box, clients pick a pathway for their area of law and answer the questions for it. Their answers become a case that a lawyer reviews.
In the back office, lawyers assign cases, upload documents, work through checklists and send fee proposals. A lawyer certifies the opinion before it goes to the client.
Platform at a glance
Legal pathways
Live now
- Entry, visas and residence
- Representative office setup
- Foreign investment and company formation
A pilot pathway for unilateral divorce is also running.
In preparation
- Property ownership and transactions
- Investment capital and remittance
- Dispute resolution
Engineering
Frontend with no build step
Pages are native HTML templates styled with Bulma and made interactive with Alpine AJAX. With no JavaScript build step, a change is live as soon as the files are deployed.
Bun, Hono and SQLite
The server runs on Bun with Hono and keeps its data in SQLite. The repository has Bun unit tests alongside the code.
Self-hosted deploys
A self-hosted Gitea runner deploys the app to a server managed with systemd and Caddy. Environment secrets are kept in an encrypted vault file instead of plain text.
Technical details
- Server
- Bun runtime, Hono
- Database
- SQLite
- Frontend
- HTML templates, Bulma CSS, Alpine AJAX
- Languages
- English (default) and Vietnamese
- Deployment
- Self-hosted Gitea runner, systemd, Caddy
- Legal partner
- Công ty Luật Liên Minh Tâm Phúc
Live platform
Visit AskLawyer.vn
Start a guided assessment for visas, a representative office or a new company in Vietnam.