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 because of our potential client’s low likelihood of success. We typically do not want to pursue these claims because the
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,
A Non-Compete Agreement is a contract where one party agrees not to compete with the other. These agreements reduce the likelihood of someone using information you provide them to compete against you. Non-compete agreements are fairly common between Western companies and their more important employees and it is common for those Western companies to want
Yesterday, I attended a fantastic webinar on alternative dispute resolution. Its focus was on arbitration and mediation in Latin America, but pretty much all of what was said applies worldwide. I wrote down one thing said at the event, thinking I would use it for a blog post and today I am. That one thing
I should have run this post earlier and talked about it as a New Year’s resolution, but it did not occur to me until I learned over the weekend that a Canadian company that thought it had a Chinese trademark didn’t really have that trademark at all. At least once a year, one of our
U.S. companies’ relationships with their Chinese business partners have been strained in the past year, and that has only accelerated the past few months, as we have noted in prior blog posts (see The US-China Trade War: What’s Next?, When Will the US-China Trade War End? It’s the New Normal, and The US-China Trade War:
This must be China contract damages week. I say that because in cleaning up months of emails I came across three interesting emails on contract damages (similar to liquidated damages under common law). Before I discuss those three emails, I will explain what contract damages are and why they are so important in just about
My law firm’s international lawyers do a significant amount of transactional work, which we call “happy law.” It’s generally happy because the buyer and seller largely know what they want from the other side and they have already agreed in principle on what the deal will look like. Both sides bring in transactional lawyers like
If it has been a while (say over a year or longer) since you reviewed and updated your China employer rules and regulations, you should get on it now. Creating employer rules and regulations (a/k/a an employee handbook) takes a fair amount of hard work, but once you have a well-written handbook, updating it should
Don’t waste your money with an English language employment contract Our China lawyers sometimes get “simple” questions from our WFOE clients regarding China’s labor law. One such question is whether they must use Chinese as the prevailing language for their employment contracts with their employees, especially with their expat employees. This question is not as
