Development Of Legal Services In The Wto System

The Legal Service is a part of Special Service Trade in WTO, so it must abide by those agreements under WTO, especially the General Agreement on Trade in Services(GATS).After China's entry into WTO, Chinese legal service industry is in severe competition against those legal service industries from developed countries. It is increasingly urgent for Chinese judicial and jurisprudential circles to do research on how to rapidly heighten the competitiveness of Chinese legal service industry in the international legal service markets while observing the international rules.This paper is composed of five sections: the preface, the conclusion and the body, which consists of three parts. The first part mainly introduces the status quo of the Legal Service Trade in WTO. It begins with the connotation of the Legal Service and the four modes of the Legal Service Trade in WTO; then discusses those principal barriers to international service trade and WTO members' specific commitments under the Legal Service. It focuses on analyzing the motive forces to promote the rapid development of the international legal service trade. The second part chiefly analyzes the effects the liberalization of service trade has been producing on Chinese legal service industry. Based on the comparisons of the conditions of some developed countries' legal service markets, the thesis maintains that complying with the international rules and following the tendency in the international legal services, China should take advantage of those favorable provisions in GATS to developing country members, and hold on the principle of opening China's legal service market appropriately and gradually. The third part is mainly about the defects in Chinese legal service industry, such as its management systems, the operating mechanisms of Chinese law firms, the lawyer professional system and Chinese lawyers' status in China, and about the effective measures to deal with those issues mentioned above, like clearly defining the functions of Judicial and Administrative organizations in China, strengthening the professional administration of lawyers' association, some ways to industrialize China's legal service, introducing public lawyer and corporation lawyer systems so as to improve China's lawyer professional system, and enhancing Chinese lawyers' political status to make Chinese legal professional community take shape.The creative points of the thesis: the establishment of a uniform legal service system in which lawyers play the leading role and monopolize the legal services involving in appearing in court, introducing the systems of limited liability partnership law firm, joint-stock law firm, chain law firm, mixed-industry law firm and well-known brand law firm, founding the public lawyer and corporation lawyer systems to better Chinese lawyers' professional system, raising the political status of Chinese lawyers so as to make Chinese legal professional community take shape.