In CEEG (Shanghai) Solar Sci. & Tech. Co., Ltd v. LUMOS LLC, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado affirmed a lower court's denial of a petition for recognition and enforcement, under the New York Convention, of a foreign arbitral award administered by the Shanghai International Arbitration Center (SHIAC) (an institution spun off from the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC)). The court refused recognition and enforcement because the notice of commencement of arbitration sent to the US respondent was in Chinese instead of in English. The court stated that the notice was not reasonably calculated to make the respondent aware of the arbitration proceedings.

The claimant in the arbitration, CEEG, a Chinese company domiciled in Shanghai, entered into a transaction to sell solar energy products to the respondent, LUMOS, a Delaware company. After receiving the products, LUMOS asserted a breach of warranty claim due to alleged workmanship defects and refused to remit the balance due. CEEG filed an arbitration proceeding to collect the disputed amount. Although the parties had communicated exclusively in English up to that point, CEEG served LUMOS with a Chinese-language notice of the arbitration proceedings and LUMOS did not immediately understand what the notice was.

After the arbitral tribunal awarded it damages, CEEG petitioned the district court to confirm the award. LUMOS filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that the Chinese-language notice caused it to miss the deadline to participate in appointing the arbitral tribunal. The district court granted the motion to dismiss and refused recognition and enforcement of the award, finding that the notice was not reasonably calculated to apprise LUMOS of the arbitration proceedings. The court of appeals affirmed.

In its decision, the court of appeals noted that the Chinese-language notice of arbitration was not reasonably calculated to apprise LUMOS of the arbitration proceedings because:

The court's decision suggests that the standard for what is "reasonably calculated" to give adequate notice is an objective one that does not take into account what the recipient knew or should have known. Yet the court also considered the course of dealings between LUMOS and CEEG as part of the analysis as to whether the notice was sufficient.

The finding that LUMOS did not receive timely notice appears at odds with the stipulated fact that CEEG notified LUMOS in an English-language email of the arbitration twenty days before the appointment of the tribunal. During that period, LUMOS did not enter an appearance in the arbitration nor did it request that the appointment deadline be extended. Despite this, the court affirmed the lower court's finding that the process of retaining Chinese counsel to represent LUMOS in the arbitration was "surprisingly" complicated and that it took weeks to secure legal representation.