“Just about everything they do on the ground puts them at risk,” said Dan Harris, a corporate lawyer with past dealings in China, who has had clients who have conducted supply chain due diligence in China.

Dan Harris, a lawyer who represents U.S. importers, said he has received increasing requests for help dealing with Sinosure demands for payment on behalf of Chinese exporters.

“Before the trade war, I might go … four, five months without getting a Sinosure email, now I’m getting four or five a week,” said Harris, managing partner at international law firm Harris Sliwoski.

“Laws in China on something like forced technology are paper; the reality may or may not match that paper,” said Dan Harris, Seattle-based managing partner of law firm Harris Sliwoski, which helps firms navigate legal issues overseas including in China.

“I generally think that on something like this, past history is the best predictor of future performance, and few dispute that China has for the last 10 years been saying it would open up and it all but stopped about five years ago.”

The Commerce Department has an appeals process for companies to try to get off the list, but it is unclear whether that would be available to ZTE because the case had been previously subject to a settlement, according to people familiar with the matter.

Even so, ZTE would have little recourse in the near term because appeals would have to be approved by the BIS, the same agency that issued the ban.

Companies must submit appeals to a committee that would issue a ruling within 30 days, according to the agency’s website.

ZTE’s best chance would be if U.S. companies choose to lobby the Trump administration to lift the ban to save their business with ZTE, said Adams Lee, an international trade attorney at Harris Sliwoski.