1. What the World Bank's Business Ready (B-READY) mainly assesses:

• Supervisory framework: Legislative quality concerning court proceedings, mediation and arbitration, and other alternatives.
• Public services: Court proceeding mechanism, digitalization, judicial transparency, and supportive services for the settlement of non-litigation cases.
• Convenience: Reliability, time and cost of dispute settlement, foreign-related ruling recognition and enforcement.

2. Key points, cases, and relevant legal policies (Coming soon)

3. What efforts have been made in Shanghai:

• During the past six years, Shanghai High People's Court has introduced over 100 sets of reform measures, which range from the protection of lawful rights of market entities to the improvement of case litigation and enforcement coordination mechanisms, and the decrease of litigation time as well as cost, to further bolster the building of a law-based business environment.
• Statistics show that the courts at different levels in Shanghai have handled about 1.35 million litigation cases and that as many as 99.66 percent of them have been completed within designated times over the past five years. The average trial duration is 46.71 days, while the average execution duration is 40.801 days.
• Shanghai has further advanced the professionalism of litigation hearing of commercial cases, improved the organization of professional hearing systems, set up special courts for maritime, intellectual property and financial issues as well as foreign-related commerce, beefed up personnel team, pushed for the exploration of optimal and intensive litigation hearing mechanisms, and made large strides in the enhancement of professional litigation hearing competence.
• Shanghai has pressed ahead with the building of one-stop and diverse dispute-settlement platform, expanded the coverage of three-tier litigation and mediation liaison networks, created 17 non-litigation dispute settlement centers and over 6,400 public mediation organizations in the fields of finance, trade, shipping and intellectual property, increased the availability of grassroots dispute-settlement branches, and championed the practices of whole-procedure online dispute-settlement mechanisms.
• Shanghai has adopted simplified procedures in the first-instance hearing of 1.13 million commercial cases, which account for 88.45 percent of the total number of litigation cases, with an average trial time of 29.36 days in the past five years. With the utilization of small-sum litigation proceedings, it takes on average about 18.65 days to hear a litigation case.
• Shanghai has become a national pioneer in the building of digital courts. Such modern technologies as artificial intelligence and blockchain have been used to build multiple-scenario applications for whole-procedure and real-time trial supervision and warnings, which help judges better fulfill their functions. To date, the city's courts have filed applications for 3,062 scenarios, completed data modeling for 827, and integrated 341 data models into case management systems, providing robust intelligent support to ensure the quality and efficiency of judicial trials.
• Shanghai has further upgraded online litigation service platforms and built an online litigation paradigm that ranges from case registration to sentence and enforcement in a move to facilitate the hearing and settlement of lawsuits.

4. What Shanghai has achieved:

• Shanghai came third in terms of contract enforcement in the World Bank's Doing Business 2020 study. The city was also continually ranked first worldwide in judicial proceedings and quality.
• Shanghai's courts got a full score and became a national role model in the settlement of commercial disputes in the 2021 China Business Environment Index study.
• China has promoted Shanghai courts' practices across the country of registering online lawsuits, disclosing judicial information on a regular basis, integrating internet-based approaches with the handling of lawsuits, and creating and improving enforcement and coordination mechanisms for litigation cases concerning administrative integrity.