I love when blog posts come pre-written. In cleaning out old emails today I found one from one of my law firm's international dispute resolution lawyers to a Canadian client's in-house lawyer who had proposed writing a contract that would give the client the choice of suing its Chinese counter-party in either Canada or China.
No need to pay your Chinese creditors because they rarely will do anything about it.
It is a helluva lot easier and cheaper to avoid losing money than to recover money that has already been lost. Whether you use Alibaba or not, there are certain "rules" you should follow when sourcing products from China and those rules include (1) conducting due diligence on your potential supplier, (2) protecting your IP, and (3) having a good contract with your supplier. And yes, all of this applies no matter what the color star your supplier has on Alibaba.
One can argue all one wants regarding the risks of Hong Kong arbitration, but the mere fact that a lot more lawyers now view Hong Kong as a riskier arbitration venue than Singapore, New York, Geneva, Paris, and London, ought to be reason enough NOT to draft your contracts with a Hong Kong arbitration provision.
A basic list of questions companies should be asking when seeking to decide whether to sue in a foreign country and the lawyers to use when doing so.
My law firm usually drafts contracts with China that provide for them to be governed by Chinese law and resolved in China in Chinese. There are many reasons for this.
There is no one size fits all solution for China dispute resolution clauses because they depend on so many factors, including, the location of the Chinese company within China, the nature of the transaction, the goals of the parties, the most likely dispute issues, the most important dispute issues, the type of dispute issues, the languages of the documents and potential witnesses, the law of the contract, and a whole host of other issues.
How to handle China factory disputes is a question our international manufacturing lawyers have been getting a lot of lately. Many China factories are in deep trouble due to declining sales stemming from the US-China Cold War, from its energy issues, and from its declining economy. I say this not just because of the economic statistics everyone sees, but also on the steady stream of emails our international manufacturing lawyers are getting from foreign companies reporting the usual range of problems whenever China's factories are suffering. See China's Slowdown and You.
How to choose the right jurisdiction for your international contract.
Chinese courts are using anti-suit injunctions to exert tremendous power over foreign companies.
