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
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
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
Let me put it right out there: most North Americans and Western Europeans do not understand court corruption. They have heard about it, of course, but they generally do not understand how it impacts their business. Otherwise they would not so frequently say there is no point in having a contract or bringing a lawsuit
1. International Dispute Resolution Clauses Every month or so, a lawyer will write me out of the blue with a “quick question” about a draft contract. One of the most common “quick questions” we get are those asking us to “confirm” that some particular court or arbitration body would make the most sense for such
At any given time, my law firm’s international litigation team are involved in 3-5 matters involving companies owed money by Chinese companies. Late last year — right before COVID I received I was cc’ed on an email from one of our litigators to an attorney who is regular counsel for a company we are assisting
Our international litigation lawyers long ago developed template emails for responding to companies that write us about their China product quality problems. The below is the one we use for U.S. companies that write us with a China product quality problem and the contract provided us is not good at all. Most of the time
