CPA Case Awarded 2011 “Deal of the Year” by China Business Law Journal
China Patent Agent (H.K.) Ltd. (CPA) is pleased to announce that an administrative litigation case it handled was awarded the top spot in “Deals of the Year” under intellectual property category for 2011 by China Business Law Journal.
The case that earns the title for CPA relates to an administrative lawsuit the firm filed on behalf of Haier Group with the Tokyo High Court in Japan. Subsequent to the Group’s application for a patent directed to bidirectional rotation technology for use in washing machines and its reexamination request being rejected respectively in 2008 and 2010 by the Japan Patent Office, CPA instituted administrative litigation on behalf of the client in September 2010. By October 2011 after four court hearings, it was finally established that previous rejections against the patent application for lacking inventive step were inappropriate, and said decisions were revoked accordingly.
According to China Business Law Journal, winning cases or deals have to demonstrate their significance from a legal and regulatory standpoint as welll as their uniqueness and complexity. For the case of CPA, the evaluation team of the journal has taken into consideration the context that it is rare for domestic applicants to lodge patent administrative lawsuits in Japan, and even rarer for such cases to win, and in this sense, the case has achieved something particularly encouraging in the area of IP rights protection for the rightholders.
