Shandong instructs lawyers to facilitate enterprises’ work resumption

The Department of Justice of East China's Shandong province has released a guideline instructing lawyers to provide pro bono legal services for enterprises' work resumption during the period of epidemic prevention.

The guideline stresses conducting legal review of policies regarding work resumption and publicizing and explaining them to enterprises. 

Specifically, it orders legal counsels for the Party and government agencies and public office lawyers to review the legality of work resumption-related policies and measures issued by local governments, asks lawyers to compile relevant laws, regulations, polices of both central and local governments and the supporting measures developed by government agencies in order to provide enterprises with legal guidance for the whole process of their work resumption, and calls on lawyers to write articles or produce videos to explain policies on matters such as fee and tax cuts and postponement of enterprises' payment of social security fees, which are among enterprises' major concerns.

The guideline calls for all-round legal services for enterprises' work resumption, including helping them improve their internal rules and promoting the precise implementation of relevant supporting measures, helping them cope with all types of risks to minimize the impact of the epidemic on their operations, guiding them in resolving conflicts and disputes through online mediation, providing effective services for industries hard hit by the epidemic and key epidemic prevention products manufacturing enterprises, and lending legal support to small, medium or micro-sized enterprises on the verge of bankruptcy and  impoverished workers as well. 

Lawyers are also asked to assist enterprises that have been taken over in filing work resumption applications and conducting epidemic prevention while, at the same time, providing foreign-related legal services to facilitate the work resumption of leading enterprises of great importance to the global supply chain and key export companies.

The guideline also stresses building various pro bono legal service platforms, asking for special sections on the province's online public legal service network and 12348 hotline platform to provide uninterrupted legal services for enterprises' work resumption, diversified, differentiated and targeted legal examination services for enterprises as well as lawyers' proposals on enterprises' work resumption and social and economic development which will be forwarded to legislative bodies and government agencies at various levels.

Legal service teams of pro bono lawyers and lawyers who are Party members must be organized to safeguard enterprises' legal rights and interests and help them resume their work, partly by publishing relevant guiding cases.

The guideline also emphasizes support for lawyers, including requiring the leadership of lawyers' association at various levels, renowned lawyers and their law firms, lawyers who are Party members and lawyers who are deputies to local people' s congresses or members of local people's political consultative conferences to take the initiative in providing pro bono legal services, improving the performance evaluation mechanism for lawyers by adding pro bono legal services to the evaluation system, and drawing on various means to publicize moving stories and role models from the campaign of providing pro bono enterprise-based legal services.