Companies often contact my law firm’s international IP attorneys for help stopping Chinese companies from infringing on their IP — usually a trademark, but sometimes a copyright or a patent or even a trade secret.
We have written many of these cease and desist letters to Chinese companies and they work surprisingly well.
If you are faced with someone in China using your IP, you can pursue either administrative remedies of court remedies, but both of these paths require spending quite a bit of money on lawyers and take time for any results. A cease and desist letter (sometimes called a “lawyer’s letter”) will almost certainly be faster and cheaper.
Cease and desist letters tend to work well if sent to a legitimate company. The legitimate company usually does not want to risk its reputation or money on a losing claim, but the fly-by-night company typically does not care. It is essential these letters be written in Chinese and refer specifically to the legal and factual basis of the IP claims.
It does not make sense to send such a letter to a fly-by-night company that is almost certainly just going to ignore it and it also does not make sense to send such a letter if it is important that you catch the offending company unawares with your law suit. It is oftentimes a good idea to secure an evidence preservation order from a court and you typically want that order to hit the offending company completely unawares so that its time to destroy evidence is minimized. It is also a good idea to conduct some basic due diligence on the potential letter recipient before sending the letter.
What have you found with these?
