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China Contracts: Dispute Resolution Clauses
In yesterday’s Quick Question Friday, China Law Answers, Part XXXV, I posed what is probably the single most common question our China lawyers get from our fellow lawyers: “What should we put in our dispute resolution provision in the contract we are drafting with a China company.” And then I very briefly explained how there is no one fits all answer and that the right dispute resolution clause should be determined based on a totality of the circumstances. I also promised to expound on that answer today, and so here goes, part I of how to draft the right dispute resolution clause for your particular situation.
The dispute resolution provision you put into your China contract may be the most important provision in the contract. If you put in a dispute resolution provision that makes sense, your Chinese company counter-party with whom you are contracting will be afraid to breach the contract. Conversely, if you put into the contract a dispute resolution provision that will not work, you are signaling to your Chinese company counter-party that it can breach its contract with you with impunity. Yes, it really is that important.
In fact, whenever I am asked to review a contract between a US company and a China company, the first provision I look at is the dispute resolution clause. Far too often when I am asked to review such a contract, it is by a new client who did not use one of the China attorneys at my law firm to draft the contract and I am now being asked to review the contract because something has gone wrong and the new client wants to know what it can do. I review the dispute resolution clause first to see if there is even any point in determining the strength or the weakness of the US company’s claims against the Chinese company. If the contract calls for litigation in the United States, before a US Court and the Chinese company has no assets in the United States, the quality of the case just went way down.
China does not enforce US court judgments. It just doesn’t. Since China will not enforce any judgment that you receive from the US court, your winning in the US court will likely be meaningless. Getting a US judgment against a Chinese company with assets only in China is of no use. Getting a US judgment against a Chinese company that has assets in the United States or in some other country that will enforce a US judgment (Korea and Canada spring immediately to mind) might have some value. This means though that if you have an existing contract that requires disputes between you and your Chinese counter-party be resolved in a US court, you probably have a contract that does not work and you should be seriously considering trying to negotiate a new contract.
Way back in 2006, in Enforcing Foreign Judgments In China — Let’s Sue Twice, we wrote about how a typical phone call goes when someone calls us for help enforcing their US judgment in China:
Caller: I have a two million dollar judgment against Chinese company X in China, can you help me enforce it?
Me: Is it a default judgment here in the United States?
Caller: Yes.
Me: Chinese courts do not enforce United States’ judgments and they don’t give any credence whatsoever to United States default judgments. Did you discuss this possibility with your U.S. lawyer before you sued here in the United States?
Caller: [long silence] …. Yes. He told me getting a judgment here couldn’t hurt?
Me: Did your lawyer charge you to get it?
Caller: Yeah. I had to pay him and I had to pay all sorts of people to get that company served in China.
Me: Sorry.
So much of the time in your China contracts, it will make sense to draft a dispute resolution clause with your Chinese counter-party that calls for disputes to be resolved by a Chinese court (or sometimes by arbitration in China or outside of China).
In the next post in this series, I will discuss the pros and cons of using arbitration outside China (foreign aribitration) to resolve your contract disputes.
We will be discussing the practical aspects of Chinese law and how it impacts business there. We will be telling you what works and what does not and what you as a businessperson can do to use the law to your advantage. Our aim is to assist businesses already in China or planning to go into China, not to break new ground in legal theory or policy.
Source: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2016/11/china-contracts-dispute-resolution-clauses.html
