Image by user “chaitawat“, WIkimedia Commons.

My May 18, 2018 post “How to Serve Process in China… important updates”  highlighted a pair of developments in the submission of Hague Service Convention requests to the Central Authority for the People’s Republic of China.  In short… 

  1. They moved.
  2. You can’t send a fee check anymore.  Wire transfers only.

Not great news, but hopefully the post helped clear up a bit of confusiion.

Well, today I learned that the Chinese are leading the charge into the 21st century (yeah, the one we’ve been in for almost two decades) by establishing an online portal for submission of requests.  No more printing, no more FedEx or UPS delays, and no more wondering if the paperwork actually reached the right desk in Beijing. From the folks at the International Legal Cooperation Center, a unit of the Ministry of Justice in Beijing:

Dear Colleagues,

To improve the efficiency of judicial assistance in civil matters, our Ministry has developed an online Civil and Commercial Judicial Assistance System. We invite you to use this newly launched system to submit any request for judicial assistance in civil and commercial matters in the framework of Hague Service Convention, Hague Evidence Convention and bilateral treaties signed between foreign countries and China.

Please log onto www.ilcc.online, register and use.

We hope to see your requests coming onto the system very soon.

For the record, I’ve signed up but have yet to use it– I sent a couple of traditional hard copy requests over just last week– but will update this space as soon as I have a basis to comment.

And for an even more important record, other countries ought to follow China’s lead and do likewise.*


* In my original version of this column, I opined that the U.S. should especially follow China’s lead.  Turns out, we already do that, and we did it first.  ABC Legal, the company designated to process requests on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice, provides just such an online portal.  My apologies to both for not knowing that– I don’t handle inbound requests, obviously, and I should have looked into the matter before lodging a criticism.