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.
This very long post aims to provide an overview of the challenges of manufacturing in China, as well as strategies for minimizing risks and maximizing opportunities. It outlines the administrative and regulatory requirements, process and production challenges, and specific cultural and market-specific risks.
China employee problems are increasing. We explain how to prevent such problems from occuring and how to nip them in the bud when they do.
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.
Chinese companies are increasingly requesting/requiring that their contracts with foreign companies mandate disputes be resolved via arbitration in China.
If you want to greatly increase your chances of being able to enforce your contract with your Chinese counter-party company, you should do the below. You should do a lot more than this, both within and outside your contract, but I am limiting this post to just those things directly and nearly always necessary for enforcing a Chinese contract and its terms)
Have a written contract.
Have the written contract set out how disputes will be resolved and, more importantly, set forth the right forum for those disputes;
Have Chinese be the official language of your contract if it is going to be enforced in China, which usually (but not always) makes sense;
Have the written contract set out in excruciating detail what the Chinese company must do to comply with the contract;
Set out the damages the Chinese company must pay if it fails to comply with the contract;
Make sure the Chinese company signs and seals your contract.
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.
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.
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.
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.
