Clients, potential clients and the press are always asking our China lawyers what foreign companies doing business in or with China need to know to stay out of legal trouble. Since a client recently asked me to speak remotely to their company about the legal issues of which the company and its employees should be
As regular readers of this blog should know, employers in China, (especially foreign employers) face myriad, complicated and hypertechnical local employment laws. This often means that one small employer mistake can lead to big and expensive problems. As much as we wish all our employment law clients would first come to us requesting we audit
I love when blog posts come pre-written. In cleaning out old emails today I found one from one of my law firm’s international dispute resolution lawyers to a Canadian client’s in-house lawyer who had proposed writing a contract that would give the client the choice of suing its Chinese counter-party in either Canada or China.
Selling a stripped down (off the shelf) WFOE seldom works. Sorry.
Even in the best of times, employee terminations in China are fraught with risk. A mishandled China employee termination (or even just the discussions surrounding the termination) can quickly cause problems. China's declining economy has weakened its job market and made both employees and the government more likely to fight back against any little termination mistake.
Even though China private equity (PE) activity has cooled down (see here and here), our law firm has even this year been involved in many U.S. PE transactions involving China entities, employees, and assets. These deals are typically conducted at the U.S. entity level between two private equity groups, with the seller in each instance
China's Data Security Law will impact your U.S. litigation
About six months ago, in Deliberately Bringing China Down, Factory by Factory, I wrote about a couple of Americans who were buying product on credit from Chinese factories, with no intention of ever making the required second payment: The “this” to which I am referring is an underground (I say underground because I have never
If you are a China employer, you must have a written employment contract with all your employees. Once you hire an employee in China it is generally difficult to terminate that employee during his or her contract term. It is also difficult to terminate your employees correctly in China, and there is usually a big price to pay for doing it wrong.
We have put the kibosh on many China-related deals, and that is what this post is about, especially in this environment with financially distressed companies popping up all around thanks to the trade war and Covid. For ease of explanation and to camouflage the identities of those involved, I have amalgamated a bunch of them into one. This scenario is incredibly typical, including the retirement of the owner precipitating the need for the deal.
