Abstract: Technological innovation is the fundamental driving force for economic growth, and judicial protection and legal services are important tools for promoting technological innovation. However, the researches on the impact of judicial protection and legal services on technological innovations have to be deepened, and their conclusions are inconsistent. The reasons are: (1) The evaluation on degree of judicial protection is not comprehensive enough. For example, the practice of using a single indicator (such as the proportion of lawyers in the total population or the number of courts in the first instance of patent disputes as a substitute variable) is simple and easy, but the problem of partiality is more obvious. The method of measuring from the perspective of intellectual property legislation ignores distinctions between legislation and law enforcement, while overestimating the actual level of protection in developing countries. China is still perfecting the rule of law, and the degree of law enforcement still lags far behind legislative practice. (2) The research scope is too narrow, and it should not be limited to the disputes on intellectual property rights, infringement, etc., and should focus on comprehensive judicial protection covering intellectual property output and application. Moreover, research on the relationship between judicial protection and different levels of technological innovation and regional differences remains pending. (3) Ignore the role of legal services.Based on panel data from 30 provinces and municipalities in China between 1998 and 2013, this paper integrates technological innovation, judicial efficiency, judicial quality, and legal services into a unified endogenous framework, which evaluates the judicial efficiency by the settlement rate. This work uses the ratio of the number of civil administrative protests closely related to the judicial protection of scientific and technological innovation to the number of civil administrative cases as an indicator for the quality of justice. We use the number of lawyers per 10,000 people as an indicator of the legal service status. Because judicial protection and legal services have a certain lag on the impact of technological innovation, and in order to overcome potential endogenous problems, the lag phase of all explanatory variables is substituted into the regression equation. This paper empirically analyzed the relationship between judicial protection, legal services and technology innovation by means of the regression with FE model and Driscoll-Kraay standard errors method. The estimation method is suitable for short-panel data, and can better control heteroscedasticity between groups, autocorrelation within groups, and contemporaneous correlation problems between groups. Progresses achieved in this work include: Firstly, the law enforcement link of judicial protection is taken as the main entry point, and judicial protection is subdivided into judicial efficiency and judicial quality, and comprehensively examines the impact of judicial protection and legal services on China’s scientific and technological innovation. Secondly, the scientific and technological innovations are divided into two levels to analyze the contribution of judicial protection and legal services to different levels of scientific and technological innovation. Finally, the regional differences in judicial protection and the impact of legal services on technological innovation are explored.The analyses revealed that: judicial protection and legal services have a significant positive effect on China’s scientific and technological innovation. Meanwhile, the legal services make the private relief a powerful complement to the public relief. Judicial quality, rather than the judicial efficiency, has a greater overall effect on technological innovation. For different levels of technological innovation, judicial efficiency has a significant positive impact on the invention, but its effects on utility model and design are insignificant. While utility models and designs are more sensitive to the judicial quality, legal services have a greater role in promoting innovation. In addition, there is an obvious regional variation in the importance of judicial efficiency, judicial quality and legal services on the technological innovations. The positive effect of judicial efficiency on technological innovation is more notable in the eastern region; the improvement of judicial quality has a more significant promoting effect on technological innovation in the central and western regions. Finally, improvement in legal services plays the most important role for promoting technological innovation in the western region.Apart of strengthening the judicial protection of scientific and technological innovation, on the one hand, we must adhere to the principle of “both hands and hard work” in judicial efficiency and judicial quality. Meanwhile, in the specific implementation, we should target different levels of innovation and the development stages according to different regions. Focus on it. Under the premise of observing the law of judicial work and ensuring the quality of justice and for the purpose of encouraging high-level innovation, we should focus on exploring new measures to improve judicial efficiency in judicial reform, but in the central and western regions where judicial quality is not fully guaranteed, we must not be blind in the pursuit of judicial efficiency. The promotion of judicial quality should be a priority. In addition, strengthening the judicial protection of scientific and technological innovation requires not only scientific and rational optimization of the internal resources allocation of the court, but also the need to integrate external forces, strengthen the cultivation of social services such as legal service institutions, and promote the scale, specialization, branding and internationalization of the legal service industry. The development of the direction has made legal services a bridge and link for the effective connection between public relief and private relief. On the one hand, the use of the professionalism and efficiency of legal services to establish a system of technical identification of judicial identification, expert support, etc., improve effectively the quality and efficiency of judicial protection of scientific and technological innovation. On the other hand, intellectual property owners are encouraged to use legal professional services to defend their rights, raise awareness of intellectual property rights of intellectual property rights, shock the infringers, and resolve a large number of intellectual property disputes before the prosecution, thus alleviating the shortage of judicial resources.

Key words: judicial efficiency, judicial quality, legal service, technological innovation