Suzhou steps up efforts to promote foreign-related legal services

In recent years, Suzhou city, East China's Jiangsu province, has implemented measures to improve foreign-related legal services by continuously enhancing team capacity of foreign-related talents and expanding the service scope.

These measures helped provide high-quality and efficient legal services for major foreign-related economic and trade activities, as well as for important engineering projects, promoting the city's foreign-related legal services in the overseas market.

So far, Suzhou has more than 29,000 foreign trade enterprises and nearly 18,000 foreign-funded enterprises. Since 2022, demand for foreign-related legal services has been on the rise as enterprises actively participate in Belt and Road construction.

In January 2021, Suzhou started planning to establish a talent pool of 64 foreign-related lawyers specializing in nine professional fields involving international economic cooperation and trade, cross-border investment and maritime commercial affairs.

To date, 14 lawyers of the city have been included in the national talent pool of foreign-related lawyers, with 35 lawyers included in the provincial talent pool. 

Meanwhile, the city has created service platforms by connecting with administrative departments and industrial associations to further integrate legal resources for mutual benefit.

For example, a legal service center for foreign affairs was co-established by the city's foreign affairs office, justice department, market supervision bureau, the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade Jiangsu Sub-council, and the Suzhou Bar Association.

The city has set up overseas legal service centers in Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam, in a bid to provide full-process legal services for such fields as investment attraction, construction planning, land use, environmental protection, and labor and employment for overseas industrial parks, hoping they will prevent and control legal risks in investment and operation.

In addition, Suzhou has actively facilitated coverage of legal advisors in enterprises and has provided whole-chain legal services for enterprises going global in factory establishment, investment and operation in countries along the Belt and Road.

Relying on the university's platforms such as the law school and the research institute for the rule of law in foreign-related fields, the training base will focus on the city's advantageous industrial chains such as digital clusters, biomedicine, artificial intelligence and medical devices, and will help develop a plan for cultivating legal talents through resource integration, data analysis, information sharing and advantageous connections.