On November 8, Beijing Intellectual Property Court held a briefing on the diversion of simple and complicated proceedings of trademark administrative cases. Since August 2021, Beijing Intellectual Property Court actively implemented the Opinions of the Supreme People's Court on Promoting the Reform of Diversion of Simple and Complicated Administrative Litigation Procedures, to accurately respond to judicial needs and earnestly improve people's sense of judicial acquisition, and to innovate the intensive treatment of judicial affairs before litigation, to refine the standards of simplification and diversion, to make full use of multiple dispute resolution means, and to speed up the quick trial procedure, as well as actively apply information-based auxiliary means to explore the diversion of simple and complicated procedures for trademark administrative cases, so as to provide better judicial services for relevant parties. 

The court regulates four specific measures to fully implement diversion of simple and complicated cases in trademark administrative litigations:

1. Intensive treatment of judicial affairs before litigation 

The court emphasizes on setting up a special team of judges and personnel to carry out the diversion, and solidifying the dispute focus before the trial through summary procedure notification and case information collection, as well as clarifying the procedure choice of the parties, so as to lay a solid foundation for the diversion work, the pre-litigation resolution, the subsequent trial and draft of judgment document. In current phase, trademark administrative cases have already come to the pre-litigation stage, and nearly 80% of the cases have been filled out by the parties concerned and fed back to the court. 

2. Refine the standard of diversion

On the ground of multiple factors such as the parties' procedural choices and demands, types of case, complexity of legal relations, specifications and volume of evidence, the case identification and distribution procedures have been significantly improved, with an effort to achieve "precision" and "speed" in stopping  the disputes, to ensure that cases with different degrees of complexity are tried fairly and smoothly through the most appropriate litigation procedures. The court not only realizes "quick trial of simplified cases", but also guarantees the parties' right to get quick trial and immediate judgment, and enables the judicial organs to allocate more resources to more difficult and complicated cases, so as to truly realizing refined trial of complicated cases, and also safeguard the parties' right to appeal in a faster and better way. 

3. Multiple ways to resolve dispute

In view of the cases where the situation changes after the defendant's ruling is made, which may lead to the revocation of the defendant's ruling, the procedure of "withdrawal and re-evaluation" is constructed, and the "three-step" workflow, namely, the case screening, opinion solicitation and dispute resolution is set up to promote the substantive resolution of such cases before litigation. There are also the expansion of the professional and industrial mediation team, and invitation of mediation organizations such as the Mediation Committee for Intellectual Property Disputes of the China Trademark Association to try to appoint special mediators to guide the parties to handle cases with high possibility of settlement. Through the benign interaction between justice and administration, professional mediation is introduced to help "two-pronged approach" to achieve "better legal effect with minimum judicial cost". 

4. Make full use of multiple dispute resolution means 

Auxiliary means, such as new delivery measures, the guided electronic service, are adopted to improve the commitment application of address confirmation in litigation stage in trademark administrative case review, and realize centralized electronic service of pre-trial litigation documents to defendants. Explorations are also carried out in automatic generation of judgment documents and development of e-platform for trademark administrative cases, with an aim to increase the electronic delivery rate of trademark rejection cases by 90%, and effectively economize the litigation costs of the parties concerned. 

Since the operation of the whole mechanism a year ago, the application rate of summary procedure has reached 21.23% of trademark rejection review cases, and the average trial time of cases applying summary procedure has been shortened to 37 days; nearly 200 cases were resolved before litigation, and it is predicted that 660 cases will be resolved before litigation and 660 to 1,100 cases will be resolved during litigation in 2023. The needs of the parties to deal with administrative disputes in an instant, convenient, low-cost and high-efficiency manner have been continuously met, and innovation of mechanism has met the demand of "simpler, faster, and better at the same time", with effective implementation of the protection of the parties' right to appeal.