The advantages and disadvantages of traditional reaching laws for continuous-time systems are analyzed and a new reaching law is proposed. The new reaching law is based on a piecewise region of switching function. When the absolute value of the switching function is greater than one，a type of reaching law is in action. Otherwise，the other one is in action. As a result，the reaching velocity of the system’s state trajectory is promoted further，while the advantages of exponential reaching law and power rate reaching law are reserved，i.e. chattering is restrained when system’s state trajectory approaches the switching surface while the entry is smooth. Finally，the simulation results based on a car-type inverted pendulum show the effectiveness of the proposed new reaching law.