Dan Harris is a founding member of Harris Sliwoski, an international law firm where he mostly represents companies doing business in emerging market countries. Most of his time is spent helping American and European companies navigate foreign countries by working with the international lawyers at his firm in setting up companies overseas (WFOEs, Subsidiaries, Rep Offices and Joint Ventures), drafting international contracts, protecting IP, and overseeing M&A transactions.
In addition, Dan writes and speaks extensively on international law, with a focus on protecting foreign businesses in their overseas operations. He is also a prolific and widely-followed blogger, writing as the co-author of the award-winning China Law Blog.
Hardly a week goes by without a company contacting one of our international IP lawyers wanting to retain us to “stop the counterfeits” of their products online and offline. Far too often these people believe one of our IP lawyers can within 24 hours send out a “template” cease and desist letter and within another 24
The Problem with Online Trademark Services for China Once or twice a month, my law firm’s international trademark lawyers are contacted by companies whose China trademark registrations were mishandled by online trademark services. In all instances, the registration problems stem from online services claiming they can register trademarks globally, including in China. These claims are
Way back in 2012, I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, entitled, China’s Slowdown and American Business: Hardly a week goes by without complaints about payment problems or bankrupt debtors. I wrote a similar article for Forbes Magazine in 2014, entitled, How Businesses Should Deal With China’s Economic Slowdown. I summed up that
How often do you stop to think about the ubiquitous “Made in China” label? If you are buying products from China, you should think about this all the time. The same holds true if you are buying your products from any third party manufacturer anywhere. To convince recalcitrant clients of the need for product liability
China Distribution Contracts: Same-Same but Different Ever since COVID, our China lawyers have been seeing a big increase in foreign companies entering into distribution contracts with Chinese distributors, due mostly to the difficulties and risks foreign companies face when they go into China directly. Many of the companies that come to us to draft their
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 these
Yesterday, in How To Stop China-Based Domain Name Theft, we talked about what to do if someone from China (or pretty much anywhere else, for that matter) has stolen your domain name: Companies confronted with domain name theft oftentimes do not realize how relatively easy it can be to put a stop to it, even
I constantly get emails asking me (often in an accusatory or conspiratorial tone) why the China Law Blog didn’t write about such and such. As tensions with China increase, the number of these emails have also increased and I am going to respond to a random bunch of them here so I can simply link
One of our China IP lawyers tends towards sarcasm, and in cleaning out my email stack I found this email: Another company that loves China so much that they have already given all their IP to a Chinese company with nothing in return. American and European companies seem not to realize that if they teach
Every so often, someone about to have their Chinese company shut down by the Chinese government contacts us. These sorts of contacts accelerate during economic slowdowns and times of tension and that has been the case of late as well. The following is a composite of some of the emails we have received relating to
