Matters for Attention in the Trade Secret Lawsuit in China (I)

Recently, a judge from Shanghai No.2 Intermediate People’s Court published an article(Note: the article is in Chinese) Trial Experiences in Trade secret Infringement Cases (the article), and the following is the abstraction of the article and the comments and analysis from Bridge IP Law Commentary. And the essay will be posted in several articles, and today is the first one of the evidence preservation in trade secret lawsuit.

The Article 74 of the Civil Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China (“Civil Procedure Law”) stipulates that under circumstances where there is a likelihood that evidence may be destroyed or lost, or difficult to obtain later, the parties concerned in the proceedings and agent ad litem may apply to the people’s courts for evidence preservation. The people’s courts may also on its own initiative take measures to preserve such evidence. In practice, the plaintiff of the trade secret infringement case tend to apply for evidence preservation on filing the lawsuit in order to collect the evidences proving the defendant’s infringement by the courts with the reference to Article 74.