Recently, Asian Legal Business (hereinafter “ALB”), a magazine under Thomson Reuters, published its 2018 IP Rankings. Watson & Band ranked in Tier 2 in both of the lists – “Mainland China Domestic Firms: Patent” and “Mainland China Domestic Firms: Copyright/Trademark”.

Watson & Band’s patent and copyright/trademark litigation teams have been making great achievements these years, taking a lead on the rankings by IAM Patent 1000, WTR1000 and Chambers and Partners. In 2017, a number of W&B’s IP litigation cases were selected among typical/top cases of the year by People’s Courts at different levels, IP Court and the Patent Reexamination Board. For example, the appellate case that W&B represented for a world renowned clothing brand was selected as a 2016 Top 50 Typical IP Case by the Supreme People’s Court, and a 2016 Top 10 Typical IP Case by the Shanghai   Higher Court. Meanwhile, the trademark invalidation administrative case for the same brand was also selected as a Typical Anti-malicious Trademark Registration Case by the Beijing   IP Court. Also, the invention patent dispute that W&B represented for SMC was selected as a 2016 Typical Case by the Shanghai   IP Court, and the invention patent dispute that W&B represented for JUKI was selected as a 2016 Top 10 Case by the Patent Reexamination Board.

ALB, a top-tier legal journal published by the Thomson Reuters Group, is one of the most authoritative benchmarks in the legal industry. In order to publish fair and transparent IP practice rankings, ALB conducted comprehensive assessments of the candidates based on information collected from data, interviews, newspapers, periodicals and market recommendations submitted by participating law firms.