Beijing IPR Court First Supports Time-Based Billing for Attorney Fees in IPR Cases

(By Wang Ting)Recently the court has approved of the attorney fee up to 1 million RMB in an IPR case, and it is the first time that the court has applied time-based billing to calculate such attorney fee. Meanwhile in this case, the court has also confirmed the principles of determining the attorney fee on three items. Today, we are going to go through this case and discuss about the reasons why the court has fully approved of the attorney fee this time.

Case Introduction

Plaintiff: Beijing Watchdata Technologies Co., Ltd (the “Watchdata”)

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Why to Protect Legal Benefits of Units in Labor Disputes?

By You Yunting

Recently, following a disputed labor case I have noticed an inadequate protection of the unit by the existing laws and regulations, and such inadequacy has made an unfaithful employee gain immoral advances from such inadequacy in the case, and on the other hand, hundreds of innocent labors may suffer losses from this. So, we would like to put the case in discussion now:

A senior employee asked for sick leave of 1 year (it was found afterwards that the hospital has never prescribed medicine after the issuance of the medical certificate, yet the hospital also refuses to admit involvement in the false sick leave), contrary to this the employer later found that the employee was actually running her own company then entrusted lawyers to investigate it. After the check of the registered information of the suspected company, the employee was proven to be the general manager. Meanwhile, the lawyer also contacted the employee in the name of business contact through the contact telephone number on the home page of the company, which further confirmed the employee’s service with the company. The call was notarized.

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Proview Was Charged by Its Lawyer for Fee Payment Failure

By You Yunting

According to a news report (note: the link is in Chinese), the iPad battle in China has ended in reconciliation with Apple’s payment of 60 million dollars to Proview by the agreement. However it seems that Proview will soon be trapped in another dispute afterwards and related to the battle, its agents of Grandall Law Firm (the “Grandall”) filed a lawsuit to the local court on the 23rd of July, demanding the professional fee of 2.4 million dollars.

As introduced by the attorneys from Grandall, their entrustment by Shenzhen Proview was on a contingent fee, by which it could gain 4% of the total conciliation expenses or the compensation (namely 2.4 million dollars by the final settlement agreement). Also all the litigation fee or expenditures paid for custom record in the trademark battle was firstly paid by Grandall. However, after the end of the dispute, Proview refused to cash the fees into Grandall’s account as agreed and has even collected the money paid by Apple at the end of June.

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