James Han, Co-Founder and COO of Checkbox, has stood alongside Evan Wong as the two turned a small Sydney startup into a global legal AI platform. An engineer and designer by training, James brought experience from firms like Accenture Fjord and L.E.K. Consulting before co-founding Checkbox, where he had honed skills in strategy and service design.
James and Evan Wong have been friends since their time at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where James was also active as Sports Director of the UNSW Business Society. When Evan launched the idea for Checkbox in 2016, he brought on his close friend James as Co-Founder and Founding CTO. Together, they built early prototypes that were initially designed around tax obligations, which over time evolved into a full-fledged no-code automation platform.
As Founding CTO, James played a key role in shaping Checkbox into a platform that has since won more than nine industry awards, built around the ability to digitize and automate expert knowledge and processes. Today, Checkbox delivers AI-powered legal intake and workflow automation, transforming unstructured data — such as emails and Slack messages — into structured insights that help legal teams work more efficiently.
In the company’s early days, James and Evan invested their personal savings into the business and worked without salaries for roughly two and a half years — a testament to their dedication and belief in the vision. Today, with James serving as COO, Checkbox provides its services to major companies including SAP, PepsiCo, and Telstra, and has established itself as a leading name in legal automation.
