Sue a Chinese Entity: How to Legalize Litigation Documents

Some of our foreign clients want to sue their counterparties in China. Sufficient documents have to be submitted to the court in order for a court procedure to be filed. For plaintiffs who do not have Chinese citizenships and/or most of the key evidence were formed outside Chinese territory, document legalization procedure provided by the “Civil Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China“ have to go through. Landing law offices have successfully helped many foreign litigations to go through this procedure.

Here is a brief guidance of what you should do if you need to file a case in China.

Normally, the following documents are required to be legalized in order for a case to be filed in Chinese courts.

1.Documents which prove your identity. For natural person, your passport page which reflects your full name, address and your pictures should be provided. For a company, certificate of incorporation (provided by the company), certificate of identity of legal representative (provided by Chinese law firm) and passport page of legal representative, which reflects the photo and passport number.

2.Power of Attorney provided by Chinese law firm.

3.Critical evidence which prove your claim against the other party, namely bank transaction records, communication records and other related evidence which support your claim (recommended but not necessary).

All the documents mentioned above should be certified by a local notary public. Then normally they need to be legalized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After these two steps have complete. The final step is to go to the related Chinese embassy/consulate.

Usually, an application form which can be found and downloaded on the embassy website, is needed to be filled in and bring together with the document mentioned above before you go to the embassy.

One thing should be notice is that because of the covid-19 pandemic, many public authority’s working time might be changed. Therefore, please confirm whether the relevant public authorities’ working time have been changed before you there.

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Larry Zhou, Partner

Landing Law Offices China

Mobile& WhatsApp: +86 13342931852

Email: shichao.zhou@landinglawyer.com

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