Recently, the internationally renowned IP media Intellectual Property Asset Management (“IAM”) released its 2022 IAM Patent 1000 rankings. With our continued efforts and excellence in patent litigation and patent prosecution, Watson & Band is once again listed among top rankings in these two areas.

Meanwhile, four elites from Watson & Band's patent services team are listed in the individual rankings of the 2022 IAM Patent 1000.

Ranked in Patent Prosecution:

Hua Xiao

General Manager, Senior Patent Agent

Yingcong Xu

Vice General Manager, Senior Patent Agent、

Ranked in Patent Litigation:

Jianguo Huang

Partner, Attorney at Law 

Yue Zhang

Partner, Attorney at Law

In the patent litigation area, Watson & Band, on a case-by-case basis, establishes special teams equipped with professional investigators to support its clients with high-quality and efficient services. Meanwhile, in the IP agency area, in consideration of general industry needs and the unique business characteristics of its clients, W&B has established permanent special practice teams to provide comprehensive services to its clients. With tactic cooperation between our litigation team and prosecution team, Watson & Band's IP services cover the entire life cycle of IP rights, including IP rights mining, prosecution and acquisition of rights, enforcement, transfer and transformation of IP achievements, among others. We have accomplished excellence in traditional service areas like IP agency, litigation and dispute resolution, business strategy road mapping, corporate operation and management and compliance, as well as in emerging service areas such as “Internet +” and the like.

This year's IAM Patent 1000 comments on W&B as follows:

Shanghai-headquartered Watson & Band has maintained a busy patent practice underpinned by its longstanding history of servicing foreign entities seeking IP protection in China. Despite its full-service nature, the outfit has long considered intellectual property one of its foremost practices. The broad remit of the IP team encompasses everything from prosecution and litigation to commercialisation. Yingcong Xu and Hua Xiao are the key figures delivering top-notch patent filing services. Xu gained valuable insight from the more than a decade he spent as in-house IP attorney at a state-run research institute; while general manager Xiao has a mastery of computer-related technologies. Well known for its established relationships with Japanese clients, the dispute team has assisted Asahi Kasei in a series of invention patent infringement actions, with huge success. Taking the lead on this were Jianguo Huang and Yue Zhang. Huang has rich experience in providing civil and commercial litigation briefs for Fortune 500 companies; Zhang, meanwhile, comfortably takes on IP disputes of all sorts, including invalidations, administrative litigations, trade secrets and unfair competition.