One of our China IP lawyers tends towards sarcasm, and in cleaning out my email stack I found this email: Another company that loves China so much that they have already given all their IP to a Chinese company with nothing in return. American and European companies seem not to realize that if they teach
Every so often, someone about to have their Chinese company shut down by the Chinese government contacts us. These sorts of contacts accelerate during economic slowdowns and times of tension and that has been the case of late as well. The following is a composite of some of the emails we have received relating to
This post highlights four common and somewhat egregious mistakes my law firm’s China lawyers often see lawyers make when representing their clients in doing business with or in China, along with a very brief analysis of what causes each sort of mistake. 1. Not Realizing that China’s Bureaucracy Puts Form Over Substance Many years ago, a U.S.
China is not an employment-at-will jurisdiction and terminating China employees is nearly always difficult. To make things even more challenging, many foreign companies doing business in China manage their China affairs from afar.
Even though tensions in the U.S.-China relationship have grown steadily over the past four years, the China market is still attractive for American companies because of its large and growing middle class and its massive and efficient manufacturing environment. Plenty of American companies cannot afford to relocate some or all of their supply chain from
A few weeks ago, a client asked our law firm to handle a relatively routine domestic matter for them. We told them we do not handle such matters and we gave them a short list of excellent attorneys that do. The client expressed surprise at our unwillingness to take on their matter and remarked on
If it seems we have been writing often about China NNN Agreements, you would be right. We are doing so because we have had a troubling increase in companies coming to us after having lost their IP to their Chinese counter-party (usually their Chinese manufacturer) because the NNN Agreements they used were worthless or even
The international dispute resolution lawyers at my law firm are frequently contacted by American/European companies seeking our help in pursuing Chinese companies for providing “bad product.” We turn down a whole slew of them because of our potential client’s low likelihood of success. We typically do not want to pursue these claims because the American/European
Last week, in So You Think You Have a China WFOE or Joint Venture or Trademark: Do You Though?, I wrote about foreign companies that had been duped into believing that their IP or their Chinese legal entity (typically either a WFOE or a Joint Venture (JV)) had been registered in China when, in fact,
Many American companies (at least outside California where employee non-competes are generally considered invalid) love non-competes and they use them as a matter of course with most (sometimes all) their employees. Generally, a non-compete agreement or a non-compete provision in an employee contract provides that the employee cannot work for one of the employer’s competitors
