The Zhejiang High People’s Court held a hearing in the morning of April 25, 2018, in the second instance of the case of Shantou Jianfa v. Michael Kors. Managing partner Simon Tsi and Partner Michael Fu represented Michael Kors as legal representatives. For details, please log on to the China Court Open Web to view the trial live broadcast.

In this case, Jianfa Handcraft Factory sued Michael Kors for infringement of its trademark rights and requested Michael Kors (Switzerland) International GMBH to compensate economic losses and other reasonable expenses of RMB 95 million. On December 18, 2017, the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court ruled on the case and rejected all the plaintiff's claims for its first instance.

This case was widely reported by a number of legal media such as IPR Daily, Lexology, etc. In this case, the key legal issues such as whether the involved trademark and the cited trademark constituted confusing similarity, whether there was reversed trademark confusion, counteraction filing, choice of the jurisdictional court, and whether the plaintiff's lawsuit was carefully planned, all of the above were analyzed in detail in those news reports.

This case is recognized by SHIPA, Shanghai Institute of Intellectual Property in Chinese, as top ten the most valuable IP case for research in 2017.

The written judgment of the first instance in Chinese is linked below:  http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/47pQg2r4g-W_YjqjvcWz5A