The cliche brands of Facebook, Skype and Google tell us how we have become intimately interconnected, wherever we live on the planet. There will obviously be more of it in the future. One of the great, unsung advantages of the EU is that it is preparing us – not for social networking, gossiping or sending photos – but for the really serious interconnections that we shall need for our future work.What the EU is planning for us cross-border today will become the global norm across all international boundaries tomorrow.

I shall use a single example (and list the others below): the interconnection of business registers. Business registers is Euro-speak for what you and I know as Companies House. The European Commission believes that – to use more Euro-speak – ‘facilitating cross-border access to official and reliable company information for creditors, business partners and consumers is necessary to ensure an appropriate degree of transparency and legal certainty in the markets all over the EU. To achieve this, the cross-border cooperation of business registers is indispensable’. Personally, I agree. They issued a consultation paper to find out citizens’ and others’ views last year, with a deadline of 31 January 2010. (If this is your favourite area, you can read all the responses on the commission’s website.)

Essentially, everyone is in favour of the commission going ahead as outlined. But the question is how? The inter-connection of disparate databases is no easy matter (as the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe is finding out in its efforts to connect the bars’ databases of lawyers, as part of its European Find-A-Lawyer project). Cross-border access to information has been promoted significantly by the entry into force of the 2003 amendment of the First Company law Directive (2003/58/EC) that introduced electronic business registers in the member states as of 1 January 2007. However, you still have to search in at least 27 registers to gather the relevant business information on companies. And even if the registers are available online, searchers have to deal with different languages, search conditions, and structures.

There are some existing models for the future. The two main ones are, first, the European Business Register, which is a voluntary network covering 18 member states, including the UK’s Companies House. It does not address registry-to-registry issues, however, and lacks funds. So some of its partners – interestingly, not including the UK this time - launched BRITE (Business Register Interoperability Throughout Europe) to promote interconnection. It was only a research project, and its results were implemented in just a few countries to test their functionality. However, most people think that BRITE is the way forward.

The commission is currently considering further amendments to the First Company Law Directive, so that all 27 European member states would be obliged to participate in the European Business register project in the future. In addition, they would like a fixed set of data to be available on the register, and a note on the legal value of this information in each country. The European Parliament is producing its own opinion, which is likely to be supportive of the direction in which the commission is going.

Some of the problems which will have to be dealt with are age-old ones in the EU. First, languages: will you be able to search and obtain useful information in your own language, and how will this be arranged and paid for? Second, notaries: as usual, they want to preserve a privileged position for their role in certification in any automated process (which we would oppose).

Serious interconnections do not end there. Here is a list of some that the commission is proposing in the coming years: interconnection of insolvency registers, land registers (EULIS), and a future database of translators and interpreters. All of this will benefit us in our work.

As time passes, and the benefits of new technology are taken for granted and expand, we will need to be connected to registers outside the EU. Already we in the CCBE are speaking to our counterparts in the US about how to share the disciplinary information of lawyers crossing borders. As gurus predict, everything will one day be connected. And we in the EU will have set the pace and forged the templates in connecting different systems and languages into a common search facility across international boundaries – which the rest of the world can then adopt and use.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents more than 700,000 European lawyers through its member bars and law societies