Protecting your position: contracts, IP and disputes

Register the brand before you launch it

Bangladesh is a first-to-file jurisdiction and is not a member of the Madrid Protocol, the Patent Cooperation Treaty or the Hague system. There is no international filing route in: every foreign rights holder must instruct counsel admitted here. A brand that has not filed in Bangladesh is exposed to a local applicant registering it first, in the classes the owner has not covered.

Filing before market entry, in the classes the business will actually need, is the cheapest protective step available — and the one most often taken too late.

Draft the contract to be enforceable here

Commercial agreements drafted offshore frequently fail at the edges in Bangladesh: stamp duty exposure, execution formalities, agency arrangements that trigger local protections, payment terms that collide with exchange control, and dispute resolution clauses that cannot deliver a remedy.

Choose the forum deliberately

A clause submitting disputes to the exclusive jurisdiction of a foreign court feels protective to a foreign party, and is frequently the weaker option. Bangladesh is not party to a general treaty on the reciprocal enforcement of foreign judgments with most commercial jurisdictions, so where reciprocity is not established a foreign judgment is not directly executable — the claimant must sue afresh here on the underlying cause of action.

Arbitration is materially stronger. Bangladesh is a party to the New York Convention and the Arbitration Act 2001 provides for recognition and enforcement of foreign awards. Enforcement is not automatic, but the route exists and has been used.

For remedies that are realistically injunctive — possession, delivery up, restraining a distributor or a licensee — the Bangladeshi courts are usually the better forum, because they are the only forum that can grant and enforce the order quickly. Splitting the clause, so that interim and injunctive relief remain available locally while substantive disputes go to arbitration, is generally the more workable structure.