Suzhou accelerates efforts to promote high-quality development of modern legal service industry

Suzhou in East China's Jiangsu province has taken measures to create a law-based business environment that is world-class and up to international standards by facilitating the high-quality development of the city's modern legal service industry, and actively serving the high-quality development of industrial innovation clusters and emerging service industries.

Improving legal services targeted at industrial clusters

The legal service center of the China (Jiangsu) Pilot Free Trade Zone Suzhou Area, a high-end law-themed complex, has actively introduced leading law firms and professional institutions on legal training, communication and intelligent development from home and abroad, as well as relevant law enforcement departments, such as courts and public security organs, which forms a chain with clear division of labor and scientific combination of functions to help promote the concentrated development of legal services and related industries and provide services for the free trade zone, Suzhou, and the Yangtze River Delta region at large.

The city has given full play to the professional role of lawyers in carrying out special legal services centered on "industrial chain plus legal services" and "legal examinations", by actively involving lawyers in such drives as rural vitalization, the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, the development of the Yangtze Economic Belt, and free trade zone construction.

In the meantime, the city's judicial department has promoted the connection between 170 law firms and 1,700 private enterprises and provided targeted legal services to small-and-micro-sized enterprises (SMEs). It has held 372 online legal lectures, visited 697 enterprises both online and offline, and provided over 600 legal consultations for such enterprises.

Focusing on digital transformation through modern technologies

In recent years, Suzhou's notarial institutions have accelerated efforts to achieve digital transformation through modern technologies, in a bid to continuously promote a law-based business environment.

In 2019, the country's first notary service chain was built in Suzhou, where a series of notary service products backed by block chain technology were introduced, covering such fields as work and business resumption, intellectual property rights protection, administrative law enforcement and inclusive finance.

In 2022, the first comprehensive notary legal service platform in Jiangsu province was launched in Suzhou, which was integrated into "SuShangTong", the city's official website on legal entity services, to provide "one-stop" online notary services for enterprises.

Providing legal services for enterprises going global 

To date, 14 lawyers from the city have been included in the national talent pool of foreign-related lawyers, and 35 lawyers in the provincial talent pool. The city has also selected 64 lawyers to form its first foreign-related lawyer talent pool, creating a tiered talent pool of foreign-related lawyers.  

In 2023, the legal service industry, one of the 25 specific areas, will be further promoted as part of the industrial innovation clusters in the city, in a bid to facilitate the high-quality development of the legal service industry in a comprehensive and systematic manner.