On May 28, 2014, China SAIC announced the thirdly revised version of Trademark Review and Adjudication Rules, which became effective on June 1, 2014.

To cope with the changes in Trademark Law as well as Regulations on Trademark Law Implementation, the revised Trademark Review and Adjudication Rules was improved and complemented correspondingly, responding to the frequent problems encountered in cases of trademark review and adjudication in recent years and the new need in practice.

In accordance with relevant provisions of the new trademark law, the Rules specifies the type of cases, distinguishes review of invalidation announcement from review of cancellation , clearly defines the proceeding scope for review ofregsitration rejection, determines 30 days as legal period for correction and three months as the period for additional evidence, and adds provisions on electronically submitting or delivering documents for review. According to the provisions of submitting documents for review in the Rules, the "public review" is revised to "oral proceeding".

The Rules also improves relevant review process, including: define settled cases as sole-examiner examination in order to improve proceeding efficiency;, clearly defines ways of correcting non-substantive errors to meet the objective needs; adds relevant provisions on reexamination for implementing court judgments by explicating that the collegial group shall be re-composed for timely retrial, and new evidence submitted by the parties can be taken in the reexamination process, etc. To further regulate the admissibility of evidence, the Rules clearly defines that no evidence should not be admissible without cross-examination.

The Rules specifies that when the client opposes the decision of rejecting trademark registration or objection ruling made by the Trademark Office before the implementation of new trademark law and applies to the Trademark Board for retrial, the procedural and substantive issues of the cases by the Board after implementation of the new Trademark Law apply the new law, except for the subject qualification issue in the opposition review; for the cases regarding invalidation announcement, review of invalidation announcement and retrial of cancellation accepted before the implementation and trialed after the implementation of the new law, the procedural issues apply to the new law and the substantive issues apply to the previous law. The cases of trademark review accepted before the implementation of the new law shall begin to calculate examinationperiod from May 1, 2014.