Shandong steps up effort to improve public legal services

The judicial administration of East China's Shandong province has made tremendous effort to make its public legal services more accessible.

To begin with, Shandong's judicial department promulgated a regulation on public legal services in September 2020, laying the legal foundation for the provision of the services.

The province also upgraded its legal aid service so that the service process can now be entirely handled on an online platform. 

With the help of the platform, for example, it took a resident of Yantai less than one hour to get her legal aid application on behalf of her disabled younger brother accepted.

At present, Shandong has 16 city-level public legal service centers, 150 county-level service centers, and 1,808 township-level service stations that respectively served the public 227,000 times, 443,000 times and 332,000 times last year.

Also in 2020, the province's public legal service hotline, 12348, received 517,000 calls from the people.

The province has also been actively contributing its public legal service strength to national initiatives. 

Currently, there are 14,000 lawyers and primary-level legal workers who serve as legal counsels for 63,000 villages and communities across the province. Last year, they carried out legal consulting, legal publicity and mediation 960,000 times, advised rural cooperatives 68,000 times, and offered legal advice on poverty alleviation projects 25,000 times.

To prop up its private sector, Shandong has organized lawyers across the province into 473 service teams which have provided legal support for 12,000 private enterprises.

Government legal counsels and lawyers have also been playing a crucial role in developing local legislation and reviewing major administrative and law enforcement-related decisions.