In the middle of the night, the mailbox received a TRO injunction from the US court. Don’t panic! Mai Jia support tells you how to deal with it!

Sellers who have been working hard in the field of cross-border e-commerce for a long time believe that they are familiar with the situation of infringement complaints and can better evade and respond. In contrast, new sellers who have just set foot in this field will easily infringe on the intellectual property rights of others when they put their products on the shelves. The better consequence of this is to receive an infringement warning email from the platform, and everyone needs to quickly check the related products off the shelf; More seriously, perhaps the intellectual property owner has contacted a lawyer and sued you in an American court. By the time you know it, you may have received a TRO (temporary injunction) from the US court. What we are going to talk about today is what should we do when we receive TRO?

First of all, we need to know what TRO is. How do I confirm that I have received TRO?

TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER, abbreviated as TRO, refers to the court’s request to force the infringer to temporarily stop the infringement during the litigation process. Its purpose is to stop the upcoming infringement and objectively protect the rights and interests of the plaintiff. When receiving TRO, the most intuitive embodiment reflected in the seller is that the link is removed from the platform and the account is frozen. If you encounter the above situation and find this email in your mailbox, you can confirm that you have received the TRO from the court:

Because the evidence and conditions of the complaint prepared by the plaintiff before the prosecution are very sufficient, it is basically impossible to unfreeze it just by opening a “case” to contact the platform customer service.

Can I still operate my account normally after receiving TRO?

Because the case needs the cooperation of the platform, and at the same time, the processing cycle of common intellectual property plaintiff law firms is relatively long, which leads to the long cycle of the whole case. If you continue to operate, there is a high probability that the funds from selling products will continue to be frozen (except for AliExpress and Ali International platforms). For the above platforms, the amount of your account will only be temporarily frozen when the plaintiff obtains the data, and other subsequent credits will not be included. However, it does not rule out that the plaintiff’s second lawsuit is subject to additional freezing. So if you continue to operate, you must always pay attention to the account and don’t leave too much money in it.

So what exactly should we do about TRO?

First of all, we should be clear that TRO will not only freeze the existing balance of our account, but also freeze the funds for subsequent orders from other links in the store; And whether the account funds can be unfrozen is not up to platforms such as Amazon. If you want to unfreeze, you can only face the plaintiff. In this regard, Mai Jia supports here to remind everyone that in order to avoid more losses, we can deal with them in different situations:

If the account balance is small and the store value is not high, the abandonment will be abandoned. But for most sellers, shop registration is based on their own first-hand information, which is their own hard work for a long time. Naturally, they don’t want to give up easily. What should they do at this time? -choose to respond to the lawsuit or communicate with the plaintiff’s lawyer to promote an out-of-court settlement.

If your store did not infringe, but was accidentally injured by the plaintiff’s law firm, and this change has brought great losses to your store, then you can contact a local lawyer in China or the United States to respond. Before this, we need to understand that the fees charged by lawyers in the United States are generally 400$~600$/ hour, and lawyers need to prepare materials and attend in advance to respond to the lawsuit. Usually, when the whole case goes down, the lawyer’s fee will be tens of thousands of dollars less. Of course, if it is really the plaintiff’s problem, after winning the case, you can also apply to the court for the plaintiff to pay the lawyer’s fee.

In addition to responding to the lawsuit, more sellers prefer to settle out of court, and the fee is generally the fixed lawyer’s fee you know in advance and the settlement money paid to the plaintiff. Usually, it will cost us less to settle this scheme and unfreeze the account as soon as possible compared with directly responding to the lawsuit. Moreover, now we support cooperative lawyers, and you don’t have to pay the lawyer service fee if you don’t sign a settlement agreement. If the compensation ratio negotiated by the lawyer is too high and you are not satisfied, it doesn’t matter. Keep talking until you are satisfied.

As for the settlement amount, the influencing factors are the account balance, the sales amount of infringing products, the plaintiff’s attorney, the lawyer’s negotiation ability and so on. It is necessary to negotiate with the plaintiff to confirm, and it cannot be accurately determined in advance. Our lawyers who support cooperation with Mai Jia are all experienced lawyers who often deal with law firms such as GBC, Keith, HSP, David, AMS, TME Law, etc. Generally, they can give you the estimated settlement amount in advance. At the same time, if you decide to settle, we will definitely try our best to get the minimum settlement money for everyone. If you want to know more about WeChat official account, you can consult the fees or directly search the US case system to learn about the latest trend of the case.

However, if we ignore it, then after 21 days, the court will acquiesce that we will give up appearing in court and will conduct a trial by default. Law firms specializing in infringement lawsuits, such as GBC, will mostly choose the highest selectable $2 million in the court system when choosing the amount of civil liability that the defendant should bear. That is to say, theoretically, after the defendant loses the case, the plaintiff has the right to apply for the execution of the defendant’s property within $2 million. Generally, the amount of penalty for trial in absentia ranges from 100-2 million. In this way, the money in your frozen account may be taken away by the plaintiff at any time, and even the new funds entering the account may be taken away.

To sum up, in case of TRO issued by American courts, we can still choose to actively respond to the lawsuit to minimize the loss.