Qingdao advances public legal services to deliver benefits for people

In recent years, Qingdao, in East China's Shandong province, has stepped up measures to upgrade the city's public legal services to deliver benefits for the people.

Enhancing institutional construction to improve service system

The city has continuously optimized its public legal service system construction, advanced the integration of its public legal service entities, hotlines and online platforms, and established service platform systems at municipal, district, town, and village levels. 

In 2022, the city released a rule on public legal service platform construction standards, aiming to comprehensively achieve the standardization of public legal service platforms in such aspects as their names, basic facilities, functions, as well as team building through normalized construction standards and service items. 

It has also established public legal service stations in 139 sub-districts and set up public legal service studios in 1,469 communities. The four-level entity platforms have served over 900,000 people and provided over 80,000 legal services for the masses.

Optimizing mediation mechanisms

Over the years, Qingdao has accelerated efforts to promote the coordination of people's mediation, administrative mediation and judicial mediation, and facilitate the dispute resolution system that integrates the four channels of pre-litigation, procuratorial, public, and petition mediations.

A total of 14 guidance documents have been formulated and released to clarify relevant departments' responsibilities and tasks to achieve "one stop" mediation services.

"Currently, a lawyer pool regarding legal and litigation issues, petition duty, as well as representation of petitioners covers 56 law firms, including 219 professional lawyers. Duty lawyers in the city's Intermediate People's Court have provided legal consultations to over 6,000 people. Lawyers have put forward over 500 legal opinions, provided legal aid and free representation in over 300 cases, and resolved over 2,000 petition disputes," said Liu Chunying, deputy director of the city's justice bureau.

The city has established people's mediation committees in the fields and industries where disputes occur frequently, covering over 20 fields concerning the economy, technology, education, culture, health and sports and such emerging fields as the internet, information technology and big data.

According to statistics, people's mediation committees of various social organizations in the city have resolved 557 cases regarding economic contracts, member conflicts and labor disputes, saving about 230 million yuan for enterprises and parties.

Integrating legal resources to provide high-quality services

In 2021, on the basis of coordination and utilization of the city's legal aid resources, Qingdao introduced an integrated service mechanism featuring the acceptance and designation of cases across the whole city, which was also integrated with the mechanism allowing citizens to access legal services in five cities of Shandong province without having to travel there.

Since its implementation, the growth rate of the number of legal aid cases in the city has reached 58.4 percent. 

In addition, the city has taken innovative measures to create a new dispute resolution model that combines the public legal service hotline, 12348, and people's mediation.

Strengthening publicity and education to improve public legal literacy

Since its establishment, the city's public legal service hotline, 12348, has developed into a platform that covers consultation services in eight fields, including notarization, judicial forensics and commercial arbitration, and offered year-round free legal consultation services to the public around the clock. The hotline has served over 120,000 people annually.

On top of that, Qingdao has organized 1,379 legal advisors to work in the city's 1,822 villages and towns, covering the whole city, popularizing legal knowledge and answering the public's legal questions for free.

A series of law-themed activities have also been carried out in the city's enterprises, primary and high schools to further improve the public’s legal literacy.