Law firm helps launch consulting agency in India

Spokane law firm Lee & Hayes has helped launch a 20-person consulting company in India that will provide patent-related services to companies developing new products in that country.

The new firm, called Bluefile, will offer clients a suite of services including analyzing and refining patent applications and reviewing current patents.

Bluefile’s staff won’t include lawyers, said Lewis Lee, co-founder of Lee & Hayes. The group will mostly be technology specialists and scientists.

Lee & Hayes, which has 28 attorneys in Spokane and about a dozen in offices in Denver and Seattle, is a full-service intellectual property law firm. Its clients include Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Texas Instruments.

The new company is being funded in association with Lakshmi Kumaran & Sridharan, a law firm based in India, said Lee.

Based in New Delhi, Bluefile will provide services primarily to companies working in India, using Indian researchers to develop new products.

“We want Bluefile to be known as the one-stop intellectual property solutions office in India,” said Mukundan Seshadri, the CEO of Bluefile.

When a U.S. company considers using some innovation developed at a technology research office in India, Bluefile could perform a number of services, Lee said. One is to “map” the patent law area to see how many similar patents have been awarded or which firms are the most active.

Another Bluefile service would be managing foreign filing licenses, a regulatory step faced by overseas companies using Indian researchers.

“The foreign filing license is needed by a U.S. company that wants to file a patent application first in the U.S., where that application names at least one inventor who currently resides in India,” said Lee.

“The Bluefile services will essentially be invisible to our clients,” added Lee. In effect, it will be just an extra layer of services provided to companies that are heavily involved in technology patents, he said.