Having just returned from two weeks in China, I was thrilled to go to New York for a day to hear officials from the city of Shenzhen (next to Hong Kong) praise their city and invite the world to the next “Bangalore”. For the legal profession, add China to the list of upcoming outsourcing locations for the delivery of legal information and services.

At the table where I was, the man from India sitting next to me had just come back from a retail fare in Shenzhen and said that clothes manufacturing facilities were leaving China and moving to Viet Nam and Cambodia to reduce their labor costs. This was pushing cities like Shenzhen to move aggressively into the business process outsourcing business. A presentation on legal business process outsourcing by Nena Wong, CEO of The Corporate Legal Standard, Inc., emphasized the opportunity to deliver legal information to corporations much less expensively than today’s service providers do using the billable hour method as the primary governor of the value of the services. Commoditization of many legal jobs is both necessary and possible. Ms. Wong announced the first Legal Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)center for the city of Shenzhen was just established with the purpose of creating a standards-based legal BPO and work with the global legal industry to create new delivery mechanisms using internet communications technologies (ICT).

In addition to Ms. Wong, the city of Shenzhen’s mayor pointed out that by 2010, China will be the home of the largest ENGLISH speaking population in the world!! With brand new ICT structures, and a population hungering to get online (under 200,000,000 of China’s 1.3 billion people are online - and, even that is a staggering number, and about 15% have broadband), China gets the potential of the internet.

That is why Internetbar.org’s project to build a trusted online community to harmonize e-commerce laws is asking leaders from the developing world to lead the way. Both our Africa and China committees are gathering legal knowledge from all over the world and are putting forth recommendations on how the law of the internet can work in ways to foster collaboration, not thwart it as existing conflicts of law paradigms do.

China is moving forth with generations holding hands to help each other. The most inspiring story I heard on my recent trip was at dinner the night before coming home. A People to People delegation of doctors mixed in with our Rule of Law delegation and we asked each other about our experiences. The doctors had gone out into the rural countryside to see how health care is dispensed far away from the cities. This is the China I saw 15 years ago, but definitely had not seen on my trip through Beijing, Guilin, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The doctors had seen rural China - and this village had a satellite dish connected to the internet; their children had been sent to the cities to lead tours of visitors, earn money, learn how to use the computer and come home to make sure every generation could get online.

From the cities, where ICT was easily available, to the rural countryside, China gets the internet. We are about to witness a revolution in low cost delivery of BPO services the same way we witnessed the change of how so much else we buy to wear and use is “made in China”. Reducing costs is a good thing for the world, as it is a further example of how globalization’s benefits are being driven by ICT.

IBO’s plan is to bring the ways we make and enforce laws on to this playing field, with lawyers and everyone interested in law reform around the world linking together to illuminate the path!