On June 22, Shanghai Intellectual Property Court held the first remote video pretrial conference fortechnical fact-finding and hearing of a case concerning dispute over invention patent infringement.

Given that lots of people were involved in the case, including both litigants and their respective agent ad litems, appraisal experts, etc., and all of them were located in Beijing, the court decided to hold a pretrial conference by remote video to improve the trial efficiency and facilitate the litigation. The conference was presided over by Presiding Judge Shang Jiangang, through which the parties stated their views and crossed questions to allow the appraisal experts to get fully aware of their technical solutions and focus of dispute, thereby laying a solid foundation for the appraisal.The conference which had been expected to last one day ended earlier after 4.5 hours.

Throughout the video conference, pictures and voices were clearand kept the same pace with the scene.Meanwhile, the court recorded the whole process by videos and texts, of which the safety, authenticity and real-time were recognized by both parties.

This conference held by means of information technology was a good attempt and an innovation to integrate information technology with judicial reform. Such "Internet + trial" mode not only saved the time and economic costs of the parties concerned, but also accelerated the trial progress, saving the time for handling the case.