Shanghai to form legal platform to serve overseas parties

Shanghai's justice authority said it will encourage domestic law firms to further cooperate with those from overseas through various approaches as a way to realize the city's goal of forming an all-around, multilayered platform for legal service involving overseas parties in 2020.

The approaches include encouraging law firms from the Chinese mainland and those from Hong Kong and Macao to set up joint-venture law firms, which may become effective in August, the Shanghai Bureau of Justice said on Wednesday when vowing to function as a role model of opening-up in legal service involving overseas parties for other provinces and cities in the country.

"Such joint ventures are very different from the existing collaboration mode between local law firms and those from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and foreign regions," said Zhang Ming, head of lawyer work management at the bureau.

"The existing mode of collaboration is that a local firm and one from overseas set up a cooperative office and the two sides are respectively responsible for different parts of the business, but the new model of collaboration means that a brand-new law firm will be produced," she said.

Shanghai is so far the only city in the country that allows a local law firm and a foreign one or the two sides to send legal advisors to each other. Such form of collaboration, which came into existence within the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone since 2014, proved fruitful, the bureau said.

Five such cooperative offices between local firms and those from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have been established, and 450 lawsuits, disputes and cases of legal advice have been undertaken mainly in the areas of intellectual property, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory compliance as well as securities and the capital market.

"For example, if a homegrown enterprise plans to extend business abroad, it can obtain one-stop legal advice regarding policies both at home and abroad at such a cooperative office," Zhang said.