Wins in court have been key to the six-year-old firm’s growth, as one of its founders explains.
GEN Law Firm is well-known for IP litigation in China, especially cross-border disputes for international clients.
“We’ve had a number of model cases recognised by the Chinese courts at different levels up to the Supreme Court,” says Jerry Xia, one of the firm’s founders and managing partner of the Shanghai office.
In 2024, GEN Law won an Impact Case of the Year award at the Managing IP Asia-Pacific Awards for its work in Panpan Door v Sichuan Xinpenghui Door, which resulted in a RMB100.65 million ($14.9 million) award.
The case concerned the well-known anti-theft door brand Panpan and involved trademark infringement, false advertising, commercial defamation and unfair competition issues.
“With litigation, when you do some good cases, then other clients will notice and come to you without solicitation,” says Xia.
Xia has developed particular expertise in the agrochemicals industry. “My team is probably now the number one for this industry in China,” he says.
This work started when he represented FMC, one of the world’s leading pesticide companies, in patent actions against generic companies in China.
“We helped FMC get a very rare pre-suit injunction in 2022. In another case, we obtained $5 million in damages, which is the highest in China for an international company,” says Xia.
Thanks to this success, other agrochemical companies such as Kumiai in Japan came to the firm.
“They have an important herbicide product, and we have filed a series of patent infringement cases for them in China, which almost all ended up with victories or satisfactory settlements,” says Xia.
With a background in chemistry, Xia acts for many chemical and petrochemical companies including BASF and LyondellBasell.
He also does trademark litigation, and last year helped Kenvue win a well-known trademark litigation over its brand ‘Motrin’.
One firm, one team
Although GEN Law was founded just six years ago, its story goes back more than 20 years: Xia joined the IP group at Baker McKenzie in Hong Kong in 2004 and got to know Jing He – now a GEN Law partner in Beijing.
In 2007, Xia moved in-house, spending 11 years at Honeywell as chief IP counsel for north Asia and then Asia-Pacific. During this time, the company obtained a rare preliminary injunction in patent litigation in China.
Then, in 2019, looking for a change, he moved back into private practice, joining AnJie (now Anjie Broad) to develop the firm’s IP team in Shanghai.
A year later, and in the midst of the Covid pandemic, He, Xia and others left to set up GEN Law.
“One of the reasons is that we hoped to develop a fully integrated IP team using the ‘one firm one team’ structure to deliver the best coordinated services to clients,” says Xia.
The firm started with about 50 people in three offices and has since roughly doubled in size.
It now has about 90 fee earners, plus support staff.
While it does commercial litigation and has a corporate practice specialising in cross-border transactions, IP is the firm’s largest practice with more than ten partners.
“For IP, we really focus on litigation: that’s the core and the number one priority, but we also do prosecution, transaction and strategy work,” says Xia.
From China to US
With a large number of international clients, Xia splits his time between Shanghai and Newport Beach, California, where GEN Law opened a liaison office two years ago.
The firm has since hired several of counsel in the US, mainly to support IP litigation and cross-border transactions for Chinese clients.
“Many of my clients are in the US and Europe, and I work with a lot of US firms,” he explains.
“Recently, Chinese clients’ needs in the US have been increasing: companies get sued before the International Trade Commission and District Courts almost every day. So we help them manage the US litigation.”
The firm often partners with US firms to form a joint US-China team, ideally with a combined budget.
“Besides fee arrangement flexibilities, we can also ensure that clients have seamless communications because we’re bilingual,” says Xia.
GEN Law works with many US firms including Fish & Richardson, Squire Patton Boggs, Cleary and several IP boutiques. “We have a lot of choices,” says Xia.
Stars of the future
Xia says he is “very proud” of the team he has developed over the past six years.
One of the keys to its success has been hiring interns straight from university – normally LLM students in their second or third year.
“We ask law professors for recommendations, and then we do interviews and written tests,” says Xia, who says that interns typically stay for about three months.
“They are like first-year associates. They get involved in real cases,” he says. “This year I think we hired three interns as associates in Shanghai.”
He believes hiring interns in this way can be better than making lateral hires – though the firm has done that successfully too.
“Sometimes we do lateral hires, but we are selective because often people from different firms have a different style,” he says.
“But I have several associates who I trained from their internship. In my eyes, they are stars and future partners.”
If he’s right, expect to see more names from GEN Law Firm in the IP STARS rankings in the future.
