There are no provisions in the Mexican Industrial Property Law or in its Regulations regarding the resolution of conflicts by the Arbitration procedures. Up to now, all conflicts have been resolved by means of Administrative procedure, followed by criminal and/or civil trials.
Although there are no such provisions in our law in this respect, the Mexican Code of Civil Procedures, which is applicable as a suppletory Law, includes some Arbitration provisions that allow Mexican Attorneys to have the option of using the Arbitration procedure as an Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) method.
In spite of the fact that the parties have the possibility of using an Arbitration Procedure, they seldom have recourse to this ADR method. This may be due to the fact that this is not a not very known procedure and sometimes the Mexican Authorities tend to ignore the existence thereof.
At this point in time, neither the Mexican Attorneys nor the Administrative Authorities have experience in Arbitration regarding Industrial Property matters, and therefore the parties prefer to apply the traditional and well known procedures provided for by the Industrial Property Law rather than testing an up to now relatively unknown procedure.
In order for the parties to decide between following the arbitration procedure or the administrative procedure, they will also have to take into consideration the costs involved in each procedure. In most of the cases the arbitration procedure will be cheaper and quicker than litigation, particularly when the amount involved is relatively high.
As the number of foreign persons and companies interested in doing business in our country is increasing every day, it is to be expected that said procedure will be gradually accepted by the Mexican Attorneys and parties.
As a matter of fact, parties have been including in their license agreements an arbitral clause, which reflects the gradually increasing interest on this type of ADR procedures as a very good solution to avoid a very long and expensive procedure in case of controversy, regardless of the fact that there is a high risk to be subjected to an arbitral award that is always unilateral and unappealable.
The content of this article is intended only to provide general guidelines related to this particular matter. For your specific circumstances, full specialist advise is recommended.
