Organized by French association Union des Fabricants (unifab), the 30th European Intellectual Property Forum (EIPF), which is also known as “Forum Européen de la Propriété Intellectuelle” in French, takes place at the Paris Pavillon Dauphine on March 26th and 27th 2026. The highly anticipated event, which themes “Geopolitics, legislations, technologies... and even wording! Which new influences on intellectual property?”, once again brings together heavyweight speakers from government agencies and international organisations, as well as key players from the businesses and law community around the world.
Throughout two days, the event features heated discussions and debate surrounding a slew of hot button topics including consequences of current international and geopolitical events on the fight against counterfeiting, deployable remedies and tools to counter new trends of dupes, clones, generics, copycats, lookalikes, ramifications of AI utilization over counterfeiters, platforms and right owners, as well as other emerging issues linked to IP.
Zhu Zhigang, Partner and member of the Management Committee, Wanhuida Intellectual Property speaks at the roundtable themed “Difficulty of proof: between violation of professional secrecy and business secret, what new challenges for practitioners?”. Zhigang shares insights on the “Evidentiary Aspect of Asserting Trade Secrets in China”.
By delving into the country’s legislative landscape and practice on trade secret protection, he focuses on the latest developments on the following fronts:
- Fine tuning of the rules for allocating the burden of proof on the legislative and judicial level to mitigate the difficulty associated with the right owner’s evidence collection;
- Leveraging the institutional tools like preservation of evidence and preservation of acts to crank up the identifiability and provability of tort acts;
- Utilising the digital tools like computer forensics and notarising technique to improve the evidentiary accessibility and collection efficiency; and
- Exploring judicial routes that balances right protection and procedural fairness.
The roundtable also features speakers from France, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Germany, Lebanon, and the United States. The participants unanimously agree that evidence has become pivotal in assertion of trade secrets, and efforts have been made in optimizing the evidentiary regime in various jurisdictions.
Zhu Zhigang (L3)
Paul Ranjard, the firm’s Partner also attend the EIPF.
Paul Ranjard & Zhu Zhigang
Founded in 1872, Union des Fabricants (Unifab) is a French recognized public-interest organization. It has more than two hundred members from various industry sectors. Unifab promotes international cooperation and protection of intellectual property by fighting against counterfeiting.