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Commercial justice baseline
A measured picture of commercial adjudication and enforcement – how long, how predictable, how well resourced.
A/02Justice Audit – Investment Edition
Justice performance is part of the investment environment.
Examines commercial dispute resolution and enforcement, alongside the predictability and capacity of justice institutions. Identifies justice-system factors affecting investment risk.
Products availableCombination agreed to scope
“What lies beneath the country’s headline rule-of-law score, and where does the justice system create – or reduce – investment risk?”
Who it is for
01The context
Capital needs confidence. Confidence needs evidence.
Investment depends on more than market size, infrastructure, labour and incentives. Investors need confidence that contracts can be enforced, property and assets protected, and commercial disputes resolved within reasonable timeframes.
Investors, governments and development finance institutions often assess the justice environment through national legislation, international indices and perceptions of the rule of law. These tell us something important. The Justice Audit asks a different question: what actually happens?
From rule of law to investment readiness
Developed by Governance and Justice Group (GJG) and Justice Mapping (JM), the Investment Edition examines how commercial justice works in practice. It combines institutional and case data with practitioner knowledge, business-user experience and geographical analysis. It does not rank countries or produce a composite score.
A law may provide for rapid enforcement of a commercial contract.
How long does enforcement actually take?
A commercial court may exist.
How many cases are pending, how quickly are they resolved – and what capacity does the court actually have?
A country may have modern investment and property legislation.
Can businesses reliably access and enforce those rights when something goes wrong?
Rather than the entire Justice Audit, a tightly defined audit of the legal environment in which investment operates – measured across the five areas of commercial justice set out below.
Legal-framework assessments show what the law provides. The Commercial Justice Audit adds practical evidence of performance: how long commercial cases take, where they become stuck and how effectively judgments are enforced. It establishes an investment-climate baseline that can be repeated, and extended to the full Investment Edition.
02Five areas of commercial justice
What the Investment Edition measures.
The Audit can be configured around each country’s investment profile – extending, for example, to business and asset security: property and land disputes, registries and insolvency-related proceedings.
| Number | Dimension | Illustrative measures |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Commercial adjudication |
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| 02 | Enforcement |
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| 03 | Institutional capacity |
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| 04 | Digital readiness |
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| 05 | Predictability and accessibility |
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03From audit to investment
Measure, map, diagnose, reform – track.
Instead of “contract enforcement is weak”, the Audit identifies where cases are delayed, why, which courts are affected and what can be changed.
Measure
Collect and validate data on how commercial justice operates.
Map
Visualise institutions, services, case flows and geographic differences.
Diagnose
Identify the bottlenecks creating delay, uncertainty and investment risk.
Reform
Translate findings into targeted, costed and prioritised interventions.
Track
Maintain the baseline and measure whether reforms improve performance over time.
04Key questions
The questions it answers.
Practical questions, answered from case data and institutional records – not from perception alone.
How long does a commercial dispute actually take?
Where do cases become stuck?
How effectively are judgments enforced?
Do commercial courts have sufficient judges and staff?
Are filing and case-management systems digitalised?
Are property and company records reliable and accessible?
Do different regions present materially different legal risks?
Does the system operate in practice as legislation suggests it should?
05Granularity
From country risk to actionable evidence.
Traditional indices are valuable for comparing countries at a high level. The Justice Audit provides the next layer down.
Where cases are delayed → why → which courts are affected → what happens at enforcement → what resources are missing → what can be changed
It can also reveal variation hidden by national averages. A country assessed as presenting significant legal risk may contain commercial centres, economic corridors or regions where justice institutions function considerably better – or worse.
For investors, this can inform location decisions and risk mitigation. For governments, it helps prioritise justice improvements relevant to investment.
06Investment infrastructure
Justice reform as investment infrastructure.
From the baseline, governments and partners can prioritise reform in case management, digitalisation, AI readiness and institutional capacity. Digitalisation is not an end in itself: the Audit establishes what needs to be digitised, why, and what measurable improvement it should produce.
- 01Roads move goods.
- 02Digital networks move information.
- 03Financial systems move capital.
- 04Justice systems protect the transactions on which all three depend.
07Outputs
What you receive.
Targeted, costed and prioritised – and a baseline that can be updated as institutions and investment conditions change.
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Subnational risk picture
Commercial centres, economic corridors and regions where justice institutions perform better – or worse – than the national average suggests.
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Action Matrix and time-bound Roadmap
Prioritised, costed actions in case management, digitalisation and institutional capacity, with responsibilities and measures of progress over time.
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A data asset, not just a report
A baseline that can be updated as institutions and investment conditions change.
08Who uses it
Three users – one evidence base.
- 01
Governments
Identify barriers to investment, prioritise justice expenditure, demonstrate reform progress and strengthen the investment proposition.
- 02
Development and investment partners
Establish investment-climate baselines, target technical assistance, inform project preparation and measure results.
- 03
Investors
Understand operational legal risk, test the assumptions behind national indicators, identify regional variation and inform due diligence.
09Track record
Evidence from the underlying method.
In Bangladesh, the national Justice Audit led the government to commission a Court Audit, which identified the causes of case backlog.
>30%
Estimated backlog reduction from the Case Management Orders that followed the Bangladesh Court Audit (2022). This example concerns the underlying method; it is not an Investment Edition result.
The Investment Edition applies the same principle: understand how justice works, and you can identify where investment risk occurs, target the reforms that reduce it – and measure whether they work. The Audit is participatory by design: national institutions and experts take part in data collection, verification, analysis and validation, and data and tools can be transferred so the evidence base is maintained nationally.
The Justice Audit … has demonstrated that investments at the policy level contribute to significant and far-reaching impact on the overall performance of the justice sector…
The team
People who would lead this.
Drawn from the network maintained by Governance and Justice Group (GJG) and Justice Mapping (JM), working with national partners.
Meet the full network
Brenda BrainchInternational mediator and arbitratorFormer Director of the Dispute Resolution Centre, Kenya; sits on World Bank Group mediator panels.Biography 
Maliha HusseinDevelopment economist and former diplomatFormer Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist at the Aga Khan Foundation.Biography - Fergal Stapleton EnglishData and strategy specialistFormer analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU); senior analyst at SC Strategy.Biography
Justice is not only a rule-of-law institution. It is investment infrastructure.
10Built from
The products underneath.
The application can combine Justice Audit, Justice Snapshot and Court Audit, according to the commercial justice questions and institutions in scope.
- 01
Justice Audit
See the whole system. A comprehensive, evidence-led examination of how a justice system functions – from police station to prison – and what can realistically be changed.
Explore the Justice Audit - 02
Justice Snapshot
Establish the baseline. A rapid institutional and system baseline against which reform can be planned and measured.
Explore the Justice Snapshot - 03
Court Audit
Find and tackle the backlog. Case-level analysis of court performance, caseflow and delay.
Explore the Court Audit
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