Global launch of Westlaw China.

Thomson West (Eagan, MN) has announced the global launch of Westlaw China, a new information service that gives legal practitioners access to the "industry's preeminent collection" of Chinese case law and legislation, including English translations. It is targeted to law firms, corporations and law schools that do business in China for need a better understanding of the country's legal concepts and procedures. Site licenses and subscriptions as well as 14-day trials are available.

Westlaw said the service is organized into digests, with translations of legislation and cases, and summaries of the legal issues in each document, allowing users to "build legal topic hierarchies from the issues central to these laws and cases." West said all information is linked by legal concept, not just key word.

The service includes more than 352,000 laws and regulations from all government agencies 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, cases from the Supreme Court and provincial, local and special courts, e-mail alerts with the latest developments from over 120 online sources, including the official web sites of the Central People's Government, National People's Congress, Xinhua News Agency and China Internet Information Center, and digests of the law for 32 topics, including English translations for areas such as arbitration, civil law, civil procedure, copyright, trademark, telecom and Internet, and mergers and acquisitions.

Westlaw Chinaceo Stephen Yao noted that "more and more western businesses have operations in China and the law firms that represent them are now growing their presence in China as well. (China Westlaw) gives Westlaw the opportunity to be the single credible source of legal information relating to the practice of law in China." The service will help practitioners "understand the issues before talking to others, carefully craft queries that need to be answered by Chinese experts and properly interpret results from Chinese counsel. The service also will help control law firm costs by reducing the time needed to process questions and by using outside counsel more wisely."

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