lawyers | Supreme People's Court Monitor

photo of meeting between Zhang Jun & SPC leaders & 12 lawyers

By Zhu Xinyue (朱新玥), edited by Susan Finder

On July 4, 2026, Supreme People’s Court (SPC) President Zhang Jun met with twelve mainstream lawyers from diverse geographies and practice areas. The SPC’s official press reported it as a symposium (Symposium 座谈会) with lawyer representatives. The press report noted that the seating was arranged in a hollow-square (回字型) style, explaining that it signified a positive atmosphere of frankness, pragmatism, direct problem-solving, collaborative governance, sincerity, and equality (see the photo above). The Symposium matters because it provides insights into the complex relationship between the Chinese court system and lawyers. This post also provides a comparative perspective.

1. Upgrading Existing Dialogue Mechanisms

A brief search of the activities of the supreme courts of other major jurisdictions reveals that it is unusual for the president (chief justice) of a national supreme court to meet with lawyers to hear their views and resolve certain issues. The Chinese context is different. The SPC provides guidance of many types to the lower courts (as this blog has often flagged), and this Symposium signals to institutions within the SPC and lower courts how lawyers (and their views) should be treated.

In recent years, the SPC has sought to improve channels for hearing lawyers’ views. In 2025, the SPC established an SPC lawyer-work liaison office (律师工作联络处) within the Research Office. People’s Daily described it as guiding the work of the people’s courts involving lawyers, conducting communication and liaison with the legal profession and relevant departments, strengthening research on judicial policies for protecting lawyers’ rights, and working with relevant departments to improve the institutional mechanisms for the people’s courts’ work involving lawyers. “Relevant departments” include the All China Lawyers Association (ACLA) and the Ministry of Justice (MOJ ¹ (and local justice bureaus). Previously, the SPC addressed lawyer-related issues through regular visits and communication with the ACLA ²and MOJ.

This time, the SPC invited lawyers to a meeting, and President Zhang required relevant SPC departments to take concrete measures. These included establishing remediation-and-implementation ledgers (整改落实台账), taking responsibility, meeting deadlines, and reconvening in late 2026 or early 2027 to report progress. These measures signal that existing SPC channels have not resolved recurring problems.

2. The Twelve Lawyers

The twelve lawyers attending the Symposium came from a broad professional and geographic spectrum: criminal defense; financial and commercial adjudication; foreign-related work; leading firms and legal services for ordinary people; senior and junior practitioners; family law and diversified dispute resolution. Several hold positions in bar associations or other public entities, and some have experience in government advisory work. Geographically, they span the entire country: eastern, central, and western, urban and grassroots jurisdictions. They include Han Jiayi (韩嘉毅, Dacheng Nanjing)³, Wang Xianping ⁴, Xing Dongmei⁵, Yue Peng⁶, Liu Mohan ⁷, Xu Zongxin⁸ Wu Nan ⁹, Mei Xuefeng¹⁰, Cai Changxin ¹¹, He Yunfan¹² Yang Yunlei¹³, and Zhang Zhijuan ¹⁴.

These twelve lawyers brought their professional standing, institutional connections, and experience to the meeting with the SPC. Most have engaged in some type of public service, such as bar association appointments, volunteer work, or other contributions documented in government or court reporting. Although the SPC did not disclose the selection criteria, it can be assumed that these lawyers were regarded as professionals who would cooperate positively with SPC leadership.

3. The Lawyers’ Agenda: From Lawyers’ Practice Rights to Judicial Governance Infrastructure

The SPC reported that the Symposium had no fixed speaking order (as is usual in an official meeting) and invited the lawyers to identify practical difficulties and offer suggestions. Lawyers’ concerns ranged from access to judges, defense rights, and judicial transparency to substantive hearings, mediation, regional capacity gaps, and cross-border procedures. President Zhang Jun’s responses emphasized digital tools, targeted field research, procedural standardization, and institutional support. He also instructed relevant departments to follow up on individual recommendations, with assigned responsibilities and deadlines.

The table below pairs the lawyers’ reported concerns with the SPC’s responses and the author’s brief comments in italics.

Issue	Lawyers’ Concerns	Reported SPC Response and Author’s Comments
Channels of communication	Lawyers continue to encounter barriers in reaching judges, while regular court–lawyer exchanges and joint training remain insufficient.	Continue developing the 12368 hotline, the One Net (一张网), and digital “case spaces.”
Defense rights and judicial reasoning	Some courts provide inadequate protection for defense rights, and some judgments fail to engage sufficiently with lawyers’ arguments.	Emphasize that judges must respect and protect lawyers’ lawful practice, while lawyers must perform duties and protect their rights in accordance with law; direct the lawyer liaison office to leave the office (走出办公室), conduct frontline field research into lawyers’ concerns, judicial responses, practical impact, and underlying causes. President Zhang Jun then assigned specific research topics. This response from President Zhang Jun signals that he recognizes that more needs to be done. The liaison office was created to address a two-sided governance problem ¹⁵: protection of lawyers’ professional rights must be strengthened, while lawyer misconduct also requires regulation. The new Article 5 of the Lawyers Law, effective from 1 September 2026, reinforces the point that the “relevant departments” need to do more: “courts, procuratorates, public security organs, national security organs, judicial administrative departments, and relevant entities are required to establish and improve systems to safeguard lawyers’ professional rights and, within the scope of their respective responsibilities, safeguard such rights in accordance with the law.”
Judicial transparency	Concern over the extent to which judgments are published online and made accessible to the public.	Reaffirms the importance of publishing judgments while emphasizing the need to balance transparency against national information security, personal data protection, and the legitimate rights and interests of businesses. Comment: The response does not whether redaction, classification, and access controls could protect sensitive information without disabling public and market access.
Substantive hearings and case management	Strengthen pretrial conferences, issue identification, and element-based adjudication (要素式审判) (standardized but rather general, lacking case-specific details) so that lawyers’ submissions remain focused and hearings do not become formalities.	Explains that standard form complaint forms (要素式起诉状, a recent SPC initiative) include sections that can be expanded as needed and lawyers may attach pages to further elaborate arguments; continues to promote model complaints and responses (两状示范文本), and AI-assisted drafting or completion tools. Substantive hearings and trial-centered adjudication are familiar reform terms. The response addresses pleading form and filing convenience, but leaves unclear whether it will make hearings more substantive or lawyers’ advocacy more meaningful in court.
Diversified dispute resolution and case databases	Expand coordination between lawyer mediation and people’s mediation, and publish more representative cases on diversified dispute resolution.	Advance implementation of the commercial-mediation framework and encourage lawyers to recommend and prepare cases for inclusion in the relevant case databases.
Border regions and regional capacity gaps	Remote regions face shortages of legal professionals and limited public legal awareness, while judges in less-developed areas may benefit from continuing institutional support.	Continue developing the Court Answers Platform to support judges at all levels and require courts in border regions to consult regularly with legal-aid lawyers . Existing policy shows top-down support for border legal aid, but the feedback question remains whether legal-aid lawyers’ frontline needs¹⁶ are recorded, aggregated, and visibly followed up.
Cross-border adjudication	Procedures for ascertaining foreign law, sharing research reports, effecting cross-border service, and expanding digital-court applications remain underdeveloped.	High-level opening-up places higher demands on judicial services. Use digital and AI-enabled tools to strengthen judicial services in foreign-related matters and seek to produce results as soon as possible. Several of these matters are on the SPC agenda, such as ascertaining foreign law and digitalizing Chinese courts’ cross-border service of process.
Feedback accountability	Lawyers’ recommendations should not end when the Symposium does.	Relevant departments were instructed to take ownership item by item, establish a remediation-and-implementation ledger, and clarify responsibility and time limits. Local courts should make a regular practice in such format. Comments: Earlier lawyer-related meetings did not mention the same follow-up mechanism.

The SPC has framed courts and lawyers as a shared “legal professional community” (法律职业共同体). As the SPC’s guidance toolkit expands, a question for lawyers is whether that guidance is understood, consistently applied, and visible in judgments lower down the judicial hierarchy. Lawyers have an informational advantage. Unlike one-time litigants or internal court supervisors, they observe access channels, procedural motions, opportunities to be heard, use of reference cases, and reasoning quality across cases, judges, and courts. Their comments provide professional user-experience feedback on lower-court operations.

4. Cross-Jurisdictional Comparison

In Germany, professional institutional arrangements give lawyers channels and incentives. The Federal Bar Association (BRAK) consolidates opinions on legislation and policy. The BGH bar creates a professional interface with the Federal Court of Justice in civil revision proceedings. The German Judges Association (DRB) engages in policy dialogue on judicial reform. Equally important, lawyers usually circulate opinions through commentary, publications, and, for some, doctrinal scholarship that courts may cite, allowing legal arguments to enter wider professional debate and judicial reasoning beyond individual cases. [As this blog has discussed, the influence of scholarship is more difficult to detect.]

In England and Wales, complaints about court administration, judicial conduct, and case outcomes are separated: HMCTS complaints concern administrative services, the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office handles judicial misconduct, and legal error is addressed through appeals.

5. Public Visibility and Judicial Intelligibility

At the Symposium, participants noted that parties resist a judgment not simply because the outcome is adverse, but because they do not understand or accept the finding of complex facts, and gray-zone disputes often exceed what legislators can anticipate. Careful legal reasoning helps courts turn messy facts into clearer rules and signals where future legal changes may be needed. The lawyers complain that some judgments do not adequately address submissions. The SPC has issued several related documents, but the fact that the SPC has done so implies that it remains an issue. [The Monitor notes from her discussions with judges and judges assistants that different types of judges take different views of detailed judgments].

Lawyers may favor more transparency in court guidance than is customary within the court system. [The Monitor notes the ongoing discussion concerning the appropriate level of transparency.]

6. Judges and Lawyers: “Close” and “Clean”?

The judge–lawyer relationship requires both contact and boundaries. The formulation “close without overstepping, clean without becoming distant” seeks to avoid extremes. This reflects the SPC’s long-running “Three Provisions” (三个规定) campaign against interference in judicial affairs, which targets improper case handling (关系案、人情案、金钱案) as the lever for disciplining both judges and courts (把管住“案”作为管住“人”、治好“院”的落点). The SPC relies on traceable channels—to let contact happen without it tipping into influence. Zhang Jun has repeatedly called lawyers “friends of judges” (法官的朋友). The Symposium lawyers mentioned ongoing issues for lawyers: existing scheme deficiencies, insufficient joint training, difficulty contacting judges, and bottlenecks in communication channels. Guidance that dates back to 2014 frames 12368 hotline as the channel for case inquiry and judge contact. In 2021, the SPC and the Ministry of Justice investigated long-standing obstacles and designed online litigation services. Later reports show obstacles such as a “time-space barrier (时空壁垒)” in reaching judges and the hotline only as a transfer station. “One Net” supplies the infrastructure. The SPC mentioned it as a rapid-response mechanism for new needs, classified by reasonableness, urgency, and applicability. The Symposium indicates lawyers see routinized access as incomplete.

Foreign systems show similar issues. A German survey indicates 69% of responding lawyers considered better frameworks for more intensive exchange with the justice system necessary; more than half supported joint training. The U.S. 2021 PACER survey identified search capability and awareness of available services for improvement. HMCTS’ evaluations disclosed problems in incomplete digital journeys, error correction, evidence upload and communication.

7. Private Ledger or Feedback Loop?

The remediation ledger is a rectification tracker commonly used in Chinese political and administrative context: issues are recorded, corrective actions are assigned, implementation yields results, and closure is based on valid grounds. “Problems reflected in local courts” required “rectification first at the SPC,” Zhang Jun stated in 2024, because weak implementation below also indicated inadequate supervision and guidance from above. The remediation ledger that resulted from the Symposium is not public. The SPC’s handling of NPC deputies’ suggestions offers a point of reference for how suggestions are taken up and addressed. The SPC reported that in 2025 it handled 469 deputies’ suggestions, responded to 4,072 opinions on the SPC work report, and handled 247 additional opinions, noting each matter had a response and outcome. It also cited conversion of suggestions into policies, case-database entries, enforcement standardization, and maritime and foreign-related adjudication initiatives. The expected late-2026 or early-2027 followu-up session would offer an opportunity to examine the implementation.

8. Will AI Resolve Outstanding Problems?

The author of this post suggests shifting attention from whether mechanisms exist to how intelligently information is used. One Net and related platforms already generate large volumes of routine and repetitive materials. The next step is to build on platforms’ data with AI-enabled processing: directing common issues to a chatbot or verified FAQ system, escalating new problems to human review and extending to feedback management. Practically speaking, AI will identify and classify high-frequency questions in court and litigation service center database and 12368 call records, write the first draft of standard answers, code them into a library and update regularly. . This is similar to how everyday tools already work: Grok on X, WeChat’s Xiaowei summary, and Xiaohongshu’s DianDian help users capture hottest discussions without reading every item. Given the SPC’s focus on the use of AI, we could learn from the follow-up meeting reports whether AI has been in fact deployed.

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What the SPC’s Meeting With Lawyers Signifies