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#China Law AnswersChina Law Blog

Notice

If you want to preserve your trade secrets and IP, use a China-focused NNN Agreement.

This is the second in our weekly series, posted every Friday.

Because of this blog, our China lawyers get a fairly steady stream of China law questions from readers, mostly via emails but occasionally via blog comments as well. If we were to conduct research on all these questions and then comprehensively answer them, that would soon become all that we do and we would soon be out of business. And that would be a bad thing for us and for this blog. So what we usually do is provide a super fast general answer and, when it is easy to do so, a link or two to a blog post that may provide some additional guidance.

Because we do so much work representing companies that are having their products manufactured in China, one of the most common questions we get is something like the following:

I am going to be meeting with a number of Chinese factories next month to discuss having them manufacture my _____ [product]. Is there anything I can do to protect my IP beforehand.

The quick answer is yes. You can and you probably should get them to sign an NNN Agreement. You can learn more about NNN Agreements here and here. These NNN Agreements aim to protect the confidentiality of your product and to prevent your Chinese manufacturer from competing with you or circumventing you. They make sense before you have chosen your Chinese manufacturer. A U.S. style NDA is completely worthless for China.