Japanese firms should make better use of local legal services to control the risk of doing business in China as the country continues its progress toward the "rule of law," a Shanghai-based lawyer said at a recent seminar in Tokyo.
Fan Yuntao, a senior managing partner at Shanghai Smoothness Law Firm, practices law in a city where 5,000 to 6,000 Japanese firms have launched operations since the late 1990s.
However, unlike their Western counterparts, many of those companies are very poor at using Chinese lawyers to deal with legal disputes involving patents, trademarks and other local troubles that are cropping up as economic relations deepen between the two countries, Fan said at the seminar organized Aug. 6 by the Keizai Koho Center.