When our employer clients seek our counsel on new China employee hires, we usually (but not always) advise they use an initial fixed term of three years. We also recommend that before the initial employment term is up, they consider whether to extend the employee’s contract for a second employment term.
On December 23 of last year, President Biden signed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). The new law's most salient feature is the establishment of a rebuttable presumption that any product made in Xinjiang violates the forced labor statute (19 U.S.C. § 1307). This will have a major impact for all importers of products from China. Fortunately they have a chance to be heard on the issue of forced labor compliance.
Contract manufacturing is fundamentally the purchase of a product. For any product purchase, the key terms are price, quantity and delivery date. And yet many buyers treat these key term as secondary issues. As buyers focus on exciting issues like product design and "getting to market", buyers frequently fall into a trap. They assume that price, quantity and delivery terms will never be an issue. When these issues arise, as they virtually always do, the product buyer is in a situation where it has little to no room to negotiate. The overseas factory is now in control, and then it springs the price trap.
Reporting someone else for illegal transshipping under the False Claims Act can make you rich. The United States has imposed tariffs and duties against a whole slew of Chinese products, increasing the costs of those products sold to the United States.To avoid these tariffs and duties, many companies are shipping their Made in China products to countries other than China and then shipping those products to the United States, claiming those products were made in a country other than China. This is called transshipping and it is illegal.
China NNN Agreements are usually THE key to protecting your IP against China. Done right, they are nearly flawless. Done wrong (which nearly all are) they are worse than nothing at all. In this post, I explain the basics on how to draft a China NNN Agreement that will work.
Omicron is incredibly contagious and China is not well-equipped to slow it down to the same extent it has done with previous COVID variants. Omicron will likely lead to shutdowns of China's factories and convince more foreign product buying companies to diversify out of China.
Two contract International deals. I have one word for them. Don't. If you feel you are being led down a complicated multi-contract or multi-company deal or structure path, you should stop, look, think, and get help from someone interested in helping and protecting you, not in creating complications to profit from you or to try to prevent criminal prosecutions.
China's online gaming market is the largest in the world in terms of revenue, but its online gaming laws, market access restrictions, and censorship make it difficult for non-Chinese developers to sell their online games into China. This post sets out the basics on what it takes for foreign companies to get their online games into China.
At the end of each calendar year, many nonprofit organizations, including nonprofits in China, start to appear more frequently on everyone’s radar. Recently I counseled a nonprofit organization that wanted to set up China operations in some way. Technically they are a U.S. not-for-profit (501(c)(6)) organization, rather than a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, but I use
My goal with this talk was never to explain the laws in various countries so that they could handle all of their clients' foreign legal matters. More than anything, my goal was to get the lawyers in the audience to (with apologies to Apple and to grammarians everywhere) think different. I wanted to get the lawyers in the room (and I mean this literally, these talks being pre-COVID) uncomfortable about representing companies on foreign legal matters. I wanted their discomfort to get them not to lazily assume things.
