Over the years my law firm has been called in a number of times to try to get rid of an out of control Legal Representative of a WOFE. Typically, the company calling us thinks that it ought to be able to rid itself of its WFOE Legal Representative simply by issuing a resolution making… Continue Reading
Category Archives: Legal News
Subscribe to Legal News RSS FeedWhere To Form Your China WFOE? What’s Law Got To Do With It?
Posted in Legal NewsTwice in the last couple of months while working on registering WFOEs for clients, clients have come to us and asked our thoughts about switching their WFOE formation cities. In both cases, their basis for questioning came from having heard that some nearby city was easier for a China WFOE formation and had better labor… Continue Reading
Legal Guides To China
Posted in Legal News, Recommended ReadingJust got an email complimenting us for being on the US Library of Congress’s China section to its Guide to Law online. This was actually news to us as was the existence of this site at all. But present company excluded, its list of legal guides to China is a good one, and here it… Continue Reading
Protecting Against Trademark Infringement in China. The Basics For Fashion Apparel.
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, China Business, Legal NewsA few weeks ago, one of the lawyers in my office, emailed me an article co-written by a law school friend of hers. The article was on trademark infringement in the clothing industry and on what clothing companies/fashion companies should do to protect their China trademarks, written by Yujing Shu and Hai-Ching Yang of KLGates. The note with the… Continue Reading
Your China Contract Should Be In Chinese. Here’s Why.
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsIt is widely believed by American lawyers that their clients should do whatever they can to avoid finding themselves in a Chinese court. This widespread belief is usually wrong. It is usually wrong because most of the time it is the American company that will want to sue the Chinese company, not vice-versa. That being… Continue Reading
China Importation 101
Posted in China Business, Legal NewsChina is evolving and certain things that were “no big deal” five years ago are a big deal now. Dealing with China customs law is a prime example of that. My law firm does not generally handle routine customs matters, believing that they are better left to non-lawyers who specialize in that; it just usually… Continue Reading
Drafting China Contracts Using Ken Adams’ “A Manual Of Style For Contract Drafting”
Posted in Legal News, Recommended ReadingThough most of the contracts my law firm writes for our China clients are in Chinese, the first draft is virtually always in English (though sometimes they are in Spanish, Russian, German or Korean). We draft the contract in English and provide that draft to the client for their review. Once the client has given… Continue Reading
China Non-Competes. The Basics Have Become Clearer.
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsEarlier this year, China’s Supreme People’s Court of China promulgated various interpretations of various employment law issues. These interpretations were intended to clarify and for the most part, they did. In particular, what was once unclear about non-competes signed by China employees has now become much clearer. I am not going to compare the old… Continue Reading
China Intellectual Property Law. A Radio Interview For World Intellectual Property Rights Day
Posted in China Business, Legal NewsI have to admit that one of the things I love about both China and Russia is that they take various international days seriously, that nobody even knows about in the United States. I suspect that is due to communism and/or its remnants. Anyway, as part of today’s World Intellectual Property Rights Day (how many… Continue Reading
The Three Rules For Your China Contract
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsIn several recent posts (see here and here), I have stressed that written contracts are the key to the next wave of doing business in China. I mentioned that relying on written contracts now makes sense in China because of the major improvements in the legal system that have been implemented in China over the past… Continue Reading
Improving The Global Supply Chain: Create.Org
Posted in China Business, Legal NewsA few weeks ago, I met with Pamela Passman, President and CEO of The Center for Responsible Enterprise And Trade (CREATe.org), “a non-profit organization dedicated to helping companies and their suppliers and business partners reduce counterfeiting, piracy, trade secret theft and corruption.” Previously, Ms. Passman was Deputy General Counsel of Microsoft and before that she was… Continue Reading
A Legal Checklist For Doing Business In China
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsClients, potential clients and/or the press are always asking me what foreign companies doing business in China need to know to stay out of legal trouble. My initial response is usually just a sigh. Since a client recently asked me to speak at his company about the legal issues of which it should be aware,… Continue Reading
How To Start A Business In China. The Minimum Capital Requirements For A WFOE, Part II — The Goldilocks Rule
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsCompanies seeking to form a WFOE in China are often confused about Chinese law regarding the minimum registered capital requirements for forming a WFOE. Part of the confusion stems from disreputable entity formation companies that encourage their hiring by claiming they know exactly how much will be required and that they have the ability to… Continue Reading
How To Stop Your Chinese Supplier From Becoming Your Competitor.
Posted in Legal NewsRenaud Anjoran over at the Quality Inspection Tips blog recently wrote on “How your Chinese suppliers might become your competitors.” Anjoran provides some excellent suggestions for preventing your China supplier from competing with you, based on his notes from a talk by Paul Melkebeke, Vice President Supply Asia for Samsonite. Melkebeke talked of how building a… Continue Reading
How To Terminate China Employees. Oh, And Be Sure To Pay Them.
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsThough Western companies getting tripped up in China due to differences in legal systems makes for common fodder on this blog, in the employment law context the reverse often holds true. Far too often my law firm gets contacted by companies in trouble for either assuming China’s labor laws are completely different from the West’s… Continue Reading
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In 49 Languages.
Posted in Legal News, Recommended ReadingLearn something new every day. The other day a client told me of how every year he gives a copy of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to all of his China and Vietnam employees in their native language. I was impressed by this and asked if he might provide me with the translated copies he… Continue Reading
The New Role Of Written Contracts For Product Purchases In China
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, China Business, Legal NewsProduct manufacturing in China’s coastal regions has become increasingly challenging for manufacturers and buyers alike. Costs such as wages and rent have risen dramatically over the past five years at the same time that the economies of major buyers have suffered severe setbacks. This has put tremendous pressure on the small and medium businesses that… Continue Reading
China Joint Ventures Are Back And Contracts Are The New In Thing. The New Reality Of China Foreign Investment.
Posted in China Business, Legal NewsDuring the first 25 years of China’s opening up process, joint ventures were the favored vehicle for FDI in China. In 2005, the favored form of investment shifted away from JVs to direct investment through WOFEs (Wholly Foreign Owned Entities). During the last year, however, foreign SMEs have been shifting away from WFOEs and back… Continue Reading
Sourcing Product From China. An In Depth Look, Part II.
Posted in China Business, Legal NewsThis is part II of our series consisting of a law school paper by Daniel Reiter on the legal issues involved in sourcing product from China. Part I can be found here. Patents We advise Mango to register its patent as an “invention” under the Patent Law of the People’s Republic of China, which is… Continue Reading
Sourcing Product From China. An In Depth Look.
Posted in Legal NewsWhen I saw that Law Student Daniel Reiter (a third-year at Suffolk University Law School in Boston) had written a law school paper on sourcing product from China, I asked him to send it to me. When I saw how good Daniel’s law school paper is, I asked him if I could run it on the… Continue Reading
FICE — A China WFOE Or Joint Venture By Any Other Name.
Posted in Legal NewsA couple of years ago, we did a post on FICEs, entitled, The China FICE — Foreign Invested Commercial Enterprise. The reason we did that post then (and the reason we are doing this post now) was to clear up common confusions regarding FICEs, which really are nothing more than a subset of Wholly Foreign Owned… Continue Reading
Register Your China Trademark Or Go Home, Part II.
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsLate last week, we did a post, Register Your China Trademark Or Go Home, screaming about the importance of foreign companies that do business in or with China (including those foreign companies that do nothing more than have their products made in China) registering their trademarks in China. That post was in response to “East Asia Company”… Continue Reading
Silly Rabbit, The Chinese Language Contract Is What Matters
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsOne of my favorite “trix” employed against American companies doing business in China is the dual language contract, where the English language version is silent on which language controls. We often see this from companies that come to us for the first time with a contractual problem. Dual language contracts can be incredibly dangerous. If… Continue Reading
Ten Must-Dos For Successful China Product Manufacturing
Posted in Basics of China Business Law, Legal NewsA reader directed me to an excellent article in Material Handling & Logistics Magazine, setting out the basics for succeeding at outsourcing product manufacturing to China. The article is by Michael Zakkour of Technomic and it is called The Ten Rules for Contract Manufacturing in China. The article starts out by noting that “there are three… Continue Reading
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