A ‘one-stop cyber shop’ for legal services across all 27 EU member states was launched last week amid fears about data protection and the expense of maintaining the site.

The EU’s 12,000-page e-justice portal provides Europe-wide information on cross-border legal issues, including judicial training, case law and legal aid. It gives links to insolvency and property registers and allows database searches to find a solicitor in each of the member states. The information is available in 22 official EU languages.

But critics of the new portal fear that electronically filed documents, such as those to be used in cross-border virtual litigation, will be vulnerable to hacking. There are also concerns that some states will find it too costly to keep their databases available and updated.

Julia Bateman, head of the Law Society’s Brussels office, said: ‘It is great to have all this information in one place, but now the EU needs to work on inter-operability between databases and a secure means of e-identification.’

EU commissioner for justice Viviane Reding said the portal would be ‘a real one-stop cyber shop for justice information’.