Changing China

{TCB} Did you have any difficulties with the paperwork?

{Zeuli} In order to bring a case over there, you have to get everything notarized. I had no idea what this meant from their standpoint, so in June I had my assistant go to the notary and then I sent everything off to the local counsel in China. He called me back and said, ‘No, no, no. This won’t go. You also have to get it approved by the State of Minnesota and then by the Chinese Consulate.’

The State of Minnesota could get it done in a week. But the Consulate in Chicago said it was going to take seven or eight weeks. That was not going to work, so I ended up flying down to Chicago. They were very, very nice people who understood the issue and took care of it in a day or two.

{TCB} Did anything else go wrong?

{Zeuli} Everything. After we got the notarizations taken care of, we decided at the last minute to sue in the name of the U.S. company, not in the name of its Chinese subsidiary. So in July, we were running around re-notarizing all the documents. I was back on another plane to Chicago. Around the 26th, I finally got all the papers to the Chinese law firm. Then my wife called me and said she was in the hospital, going into labor. So I’m in the hospital lobby, yakking to these lawyers in China on my cell phone, and the doctor comes in and says, ‘Hang up. Your daughter is on the way.’

The baby came out fine, and we got the suit filed on time—barely.

{TCB} What did you end up liking about the Chinese system?

{Zeuli} Everything happens very fast there. In the U.S., a patent case will go for two years, easy. This lasted about nine months. Except for maybe one or two hearings, everything is done on paper. There’s very little actual in-court time.

The cost is probably one-tenth of what it would have cost in the United States. It was somewhere around $100,000, which isn’t cheap, but a U.S. case would be upwards of $1 million.

The client got exactly what they wanted. The court ruled favorably as to the    infringement. It wasn’t a blockbuster, but their patent was confirmed to be valid and the client was pleased with the overall experience.

Incidentally, that translation problem really did turn out to be a non-issue. The court interpreted that term to be more broad than the way we were concerned that it might be read.

In retrospect, I’m struck by how many mistakes I made along the way, just because I hadn’t been through the process before. Probably the only mistake I didn’t make, frankly, is missing their two-year statute of limitations, which would have killed the suit right out of the gate. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, and yet it was still very successful in the end.