Monday, February 20, 2017

China Trademark Lawyers and Timely Renewals

China trademark LawyerDon’t be late with your China IP renewals

Every so often one of our China IP lawyers will get an email from a foreign company (usually a North American or European or Australian company) whose China trademark registration (usually) or China design patent registration (sometimes) did not go as expected. And every so often, one of our China IP lawyers will discover that a trademark our new client paid to have filed in China was never filed. Not to mention the times foreign companies pay to have their trademarks registered in China, only to later learn that the whole thing was a complete scam. In an article entitled Is Your China Lawyer Real, I discussed fake China law firms:

We have many times represented companies that paid money to a Chinese “law firm” for registering a trademark in China or drafting a    manufacturing agreement or forming a WFOE, only to learn that they had instead paid money somebody who had set up a temporary website with the sole intention of bilking the unwary. I have never heard of a real Chinese lawyer doing this. The trick is knowing who is a real lawyer and who is not.

I then discussed the sort of due diligence you should undertake before hiring a China lawyer, or any other lawyer, for that matter.

As more foreign companies are getting to the point where they need to renew/extend their China IP, our China IP lawyers are getting an increasing number of emails involving trademarks or design patents that were filed properly ten or so years ago, but the attorneys/law firms that handled the original filing are no longer around to mind the store. The below email (with a few slight modifications to preclude any identification) is fairly typical of this new breed of problems with which we are having to deal:

Here is one that you may not have come across.

In 2006 I took out a trademark for a product we make through a law firm in Shanghai. It was a small office off Changle Lu and they were very helpful and seemed to know what they were doing. Today I had reason to check the validity of the trademark and noticed that it had expired. I don’t remember anyone talking about this and so rang the attorney’s office to check on what we should do about this. It turns out that the person I was dealing with left in 2009 and the owner of the firm died soon after. They were supposed to send out a renewal notice, which I am sure they did not. They say they did, but our address and phone numbers are unchanged and nobody has died either. It is just another one of those China things. I understand that I now have to go through a special approval process because I did not apply for renewal within six months before its expiration.

I was very new to China when I did this and was quite naive about this sort of thing, believing that I was in the hands of professionals before I realised that they are very thin on the ground here. Also we had yet to set up our systems in the office and so we did not have any automatic reminders popping up, so I accept that it is partly my own fault (but in 2006 I had much more pressing things to occupy my mind). Can you help us on this new go-round?

Fortunately, this particular company came to us in plenty of time to fairly easily remedy this minor misstep. But we are aware of other foreign companies that have lost or compromised their China IP protections by having missed IP filing deadlines.

Bottom Line: Choose your China IP counsel wisely and consider maintaining your own IP calendaring system as well. And don’t be late.

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China Trademark Lawyers and Timely Renewals

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