Order in the court.

Chile's legal reform, a process under way since 2000, now faces its biggest challenge--coming to the capital.

Improved rules of criminal procedure sailed smoothly through Chile's 12 regions. Now, the reforms must take place in the Santiago Metropolitan Region, by far the most populated in Chile and home to 60% of the country's criminal cases.

The changes will do away with paperwork and briefing requirements that date back to colonial times. More legal procedures will be conducted orally instead. Some 100 court facilities with more than 800 new judges nationwide will process and sentence delinquents at a faster rate. The price tag on implementing legal reform in the metropolitan area of Santiago is US$228 million.

The new laws also will modernize Chile's 19th-century criminal procedure by requiring police to hand over detained suspects to a judge within 24 hours of arrest and provide public-defense attorneys to the accused while opening once-secretive trials to the public. The new system presumes a suspect's innocence until proven guilty--something new to many Latin American legal systems. Reforms also replace judges with public prosecutors to oversee police investigation of crimes.

So what does this mean for business in Chile? Not much directly, says Hugo Rojas, professor of law at La Universidad Alberto Hurtado, a Jesuit law school that trains judges and lawyers in preparation of the implementation date. But the changes will make a difference for the country in the long term, and greater legal transparency is good for corporations down the road, he says. "This reform is key to consolidating democracy in Chile, and a strong democracy is good for business," says Rojas.