News & Events

We are proud to announce the opening of our partnership office “Sonoda & Kobayashi IP Group (Beijing)”.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions with regards to Chinese Intellectual Property law, our team will be happy to help.

Sonoda & Kobayashi IP Law is ranked among the top firms in Asia for the prosecution and enforcement of IP rights and recommended by IAM Patent 1000 for offering a unique combination of professional expertise and cosmopolitan awareness.

Dr. Yoshitaka Sonoda, Managing Partner, is also ranked among the top Patent Prosecutors and recommended by IAM Patent 1000.

Read the full profile by clicking the below links.

IAM Patent 1000: Firm, Individual

During EU Industry Week, Sonoda & Kobayashi will hold its next webinar on March 1^st ,2021 in collaboration with the EU-Japan Technology Transfer Helpdesk. Nicole Bigler is giving the lecture and will cover the Japan experience for the Green Deal. The Webinar is scheduled on March 1^st,2021, at 9:30 AM-11:30AM (CST).

We would like to invite anyone who is interested in this topic to attend the webinar. Please register by following the link here.

As the news media has reported, the Japanese government has declared a “state of emergency” today (April 7, 2020) for 7 designated prefectures including Tokyo, Osaka and their neighboring prefectures in view of the spreading COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the “state of emergency”, the government strongly requests that people stay at home unless for essential tasks such as shopping for food, medical care, or work.  The request is not accompanied with enforcement procedures such as fines against violators.  In addition to the government’s declaration, the city of Tokyo has requested that companies shift to teleworking and that people are to stay away from overcrowded and poorly ventilated spaces where people speak or sing.  We expect that people will take these requests seriously and refrain from going out unless it is really necessary.

Although going out to work is exempted from the government’s requests, our firm started shifting towards teleworking at the beginning of March to reduce the exposure of our people to risky environments and has been trying to solve the inconveniences people encounter in teleworking.  As a result of this process, we have decided to shift to teleworking completely (except for rare situations where working in the office is necessary such as the filing of paper documents in court) and maintain the firm’s functions as usual on that basis.  There will be only a few people in our offices from this week.  However, please be assured that our members are reachable by email as before and our firm is fully functioning despite the “state of emergency.”

We handle German-Japanese and Chinese-Japanese translation, in addition to English-Japanese and Japanese-English, as we have staff experienced in each of these language pairings.