1. Service of Process Companies and Domestic Litigators Should NOT Apply Many years ago, I read an excellent blog post over at the Letters Blogatory blog, Service of Process and the Unauthorized Practice of Law, on how service of process companies frequently mess up to the detriment of their clients. This post also asks whether
Just about every month, one of our international dispute resolution lawyers will get a call from a lawyer or company from somewhere in the United States, calling and expecting us to be interested in the great case they are offering us. Lately, we have been getting a bunch of these calls from companies that received
Foreign company employers in China constantly get sued over employee vacation days. The very short version of the general rule regarding vacation days in China is that any employee who works continuously for a year is legally entitled to annual paid leave (a/k/a paid vacation days). This is not news to China-based foreign employers as
What should you do if you are owed money by or have been wronged by a Mainland Chinese company? Bring a lawsuit against the Chinese company, of course. But how? Mainland Chinese courts do not enforce U.S. judgments. Therefore, it will probably be a waste of time for you to bring a lawsuit in a U.S.
With sushi restaurants, it’s the yellowfin. With new houses, it’s the windows. With international contracts, it’s the dispute resolution provision. The “it” I am talking about is the one easiest, fastest, most accurate, way to judge whether something is good or not. And the way I judge international contracts is by heading straight to its
In part one of this series on self-enforcing contracts, Self-Enforcing Contracts: A Good Tool for Tough Markets, I wrote about how self-enforcing contracts can be so valuable when contracting with a company in a country with a less developed legal system. In this post, I will discuss how self-enforcing contracts work and the key provisions
1. Draft Your Contract for the Applicable Country In How Not to be in China, we wrote about how companies are seeking to diversify their supply chains by moving some or all of their production to other countries. When entering into contracts in these new countries, the first question to ask is whether the new
For at least a decade, our law firm has probably never gone a week without getting an email from a company that has paid anywhere between $500 and $50,000 for product from a Chinese manufacturer and received either nothing in return or product that clearly is not up to snuff. These days, we are getting
Terminating a China-based employee usually requires good cause. A serious breach of employer rules and regulations can be a basis for an employer’s unilateral termination of an employee, but China employers have other options as well. A China-based employer may terminate an employment contract if the economic circumstances which formed the basis for the parties signing the
As China’s relationship with the outside world continues to deteriorate (especially with the United States and to a lesser extent with Europe) the number of lawsuits and potential lawsuits between Chinese and foreign companies is on the upswing. There is an old saying about how lawyers do best in times of great change and that
