Professional profile
About Long
Partner | Intellectual property and dispute resolution; trade-secret systems, patent strategy, trademark strategy and IP enforcement
Long Huihui is a partner in Donglai Law Offices' Qingdao office with more than a decade of legal practice and a concentration in intellectual property and dispute resolution. Her official profile describes both preventive and contentious IP work, including trade-secret protection systems, patent navigation, patent portfolio planning, trademark strategy, IP enforcement and rights-confirmation disputes. She also handles corporate structure and selected construction disputes, but intellectual property is the clearest differentiating area for international users.
Read full profile
Long's trade-secret work is especially relevant to manufacturers and technology businesses. Many companies assume that a confidentiality agreement is enough to protect technical or commercial information. In practice, a trade-secret claim depends heavily on evidence showing exactly what information is secret, why it has commercial value and what reasonable measures the company used to keep it confidential.
Her official profile specifically identifies experience building trade-secret management systems. This preventive work is high value because information does not live in legal documents. Engineering drawings may sit in PLM systems, source code in repositories, formulas in manufacturing databases, customer information in CRM systems and pricing data in ERP systems. Legal controls need to match technical access permissions and real employee workflows.
The company should be able to show who had access, why, how information was labeled, whether downloading or external sharing was controlled and what happened when an employee left. If these controls do not exist before a dispute, they are difficult to recreate afterwards.
Long's patent practice complements trade-secret protection. Donglai describes patent navigation and portfolio planning among her areas of work, and her public profile lists a patent agent qualification. Patent and trade-secret strategy should often be planned together. A patent creates an exclusive right but requires disclosure; a trade secret can remain protected indefinitely but is vulnerable to independent development or loss of secrecy.
Manufacturers therefore need to decide which technology should be patented and which should remain confidential. Product features that can be reverse engineered may be better suited to patents, while process parameters or internal know-how may be more valuable as trade secrets. Counsel who understands both approaches can help allocate protection rationally.
Her representative matters include trademark enforcement, patent infringement and invalidation, administrative litigation and brand portfolio work. Donglai publicly describes matters involving both Chinese and foreign rights holders. These examples show experience across enforcement and rights-confirmation proceedings rather than only registration work.
IP disputes often require multiple forums. A company may use civil litigation, patent invalidation, trademark opposition or invalidation, administrative enforcement, customs measures or platform complaints in parallel. The correct combination depends on evidence, urgency, asset location and the business objective.
The revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law, effective October 15, 2025, is directly relevant to Long's trade-secret practice. The law contains evidentiary mechanisms under which, after a rights holder provides specified preliminary evidence concerning secrecy measures and infringement, the alleged infringer can face meaningful burdens in responding. This increases the value of building an evidence file before an employee or supplier relationship breaks down.
Employee mobility is one of the highest-demand sources of trade-secret disputes. A senior engineer may resign, download files, join a competitor and contribute to a similar product. The former employer may want urgent relief, but it first needs to define the secret precisely and connect it to access and use evidence. Broad allegations that "all technical information" is confidential are much weaker than a structured set of identifiable secret points supported by system logs and technical comparison.
Exit procedures are therefore critical. Companies should preserve device images where lawful, shut down accounts promptly, collect company devices, record return or deletion obligations and preserve logs before systems overwrite them. Legal and IT teams need an incident-response protocol rather than improvising after suspected theft.
Supplier and joint-development relationships create similar risks. A supplier may need access to drawings but not formulas; a development partner may need background IP but not unrelated technology. Contracts should distinguish background IP, foreground IP and confidential information and should include return, deletion and audit mechanisms.
Foreign companies face additional problems because headquarters and the China subsidiary may use different information-classification standards. R&D may be shared across borders, and the entity that owns the IP may not be the entity employing the engineer. Those ownership and evidence issues should be analyzed before litigation.
Long's trademark experience also gives her relevance to foreign brands facing squatting, unauthorized distribution, confusingly similar branding or post-franchise misuse. Trademark litigation may need to be combined with administrative actions or unfair-competition claims.
Capability
