Bad manufacturing contracts lead to bad products. Nearly all companies that have product problems would have avoided those problems had they used a good contract or done their due diligence on their product supplier before paying. In this post, we explain how best to avoid these common mistakes.
How to protect your molds and tooling when manufacturing overseas
The above is a direct quote from a client for whom my law firm is now in the process of helping his company move its production from China to Mexico. He said this about China and Mexico, right after setting saying that he “is done with China” because his company is unable to sell a
Last week, in So You Think You Have a China WFOE or Joint Venture or Trademark: Do You Though?, I wrote about foreign companies that had been duped into believing that their IP or their Chinese legal entity (typically either a WFOE or a Joint Venture (JV)) had been registered in China when, in fact,
When someone emails one of our international manufacturing lawyers asking us what they should be considering to protect themselves when manufacturing overseas, we typically respond with something like the following: Our clients that manufacture product in China/Vietnam/Mexico/India/Thailand/Taiwan/Malysia (or wherever it is they are asking about) typically use us for some or all of the following
1. Sorry, But Overseas Factory Problems are Likely YOUR Fault The genesis for this post is an excellent post written by Renaud Anjoran and a series of Linkedin comments on that post. The post is on Renaud’s Quality Inspection Blog and it’s called 28 Common Problems Chinese Suppliers Cause Importers. Renaud is the long-term owner of
1. The Product Development Stage is the Riskiest Stage of Manufacturing Companies doing overseas contract manufacturing often “co-develop” products with their overseas manufacturers. In some cases, the company seeking a manufacturer has completed product development and the only involvement from the manufacturer will be to figure out how to manufacture the product at high volumes.
With companies falling all over themselves to move their manufacturing out of China to reduce their risks (and their tariffs), my law firm’s international manufacturing lawyers are not only hearing from many companies wanting to leave China, but from many companies in big trouble for not having properly engineered their leaving China. In The Single
This post focuses on protecting against intellectual property losses arise from what we call leakage — the situation where a company has a contract preventing its foreign counter-party (usually a foreign manufacturer) from using its proprietary information, but fails to prevent that information from leaking to third parties not bound by such a contract. When
One of my law firm’s international manufacturing lawyers recently completed a template Tooling [Mold] Ownership Agreement for one of our clients that is having its products manufactured in factories located in multiple countries. This Tooling Ownership Agreement is essentially a template for this one client, and it has yet to be particularized for this one
