On March 31, 2020, Vietnam issued Directive No. 16/CT-TTg of the Prime Minister of Vietnam, setting out a wide range of social distancing measures, which we covered in an earlier client alert (click here for details). Following this nationwide announcement, local authorities in various provinces and cities have released their own guidance on implementation of measures for preventing and controlling the COVID-19 outbreak.

All offices of the Intellectual Property Office of Vietnam, including the head office in Hanoi and the representative offices in Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City (the “IP Office”), are currently closed until further notice due to the COVID-19 situation. The IP Office issued a notice on March 31, 2020, to address issues related to the closure, with the following main contents:

On March 30, 2020, the Lao Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) issued Notification No. 0446/DIP Pursuant to Prime Minister’s Order No.06/PM—the latter being a general order imposing a lockdown in Laos to limit the spread of COVID-19 in the country.

Appeals in the IP field are very common in Vietnam, but it can take a long time to for these cases to be resolved, and the number of appeals pending at the moment is rather high. One of the reasons for this is the lack of human resources allocated to resolving appeals.