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Global Reach
management track record before committing funds, producing an early-stage gap. Orrick’s own
history in working with Indian firms includes the 1999 Infosys Nasdaq IPO.
Wilson Sonsini’s Raj Judge says the cross-border deal-making and legal landscape is getting
particularly interesting as India’s economy and technology sectors advance. “At first, people
accessed India for cost, but as time has gone on, the development of software and affiliated
technologies has continued to improve and has relied on knowledge capacity,” he says. “So the
cost leverage became a talent leverage, and today India is going past talent to a management
leverage and then a knowledge leverage. We’re seeing companies in the U.S. turn to India for
novel ways of managing their operations. That, in my mind, is the beginning of Indians
managing their own companies.”
Judge cites Tata Motors’ acquisition of luxury car brands Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford
Motor Company: “It’s significant that as Tata is bidding for Jaguar and Land Rover it’s also
rolling out the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, in India, and the only other bidder was another
Indian company, Mahindra. These companies have the IT, the precision manufacturing capability
and the global parts supply chains to help Jaguar and Land Rover become profitable, while
still manufacturing in the UK with all of the union restrictions and legacy costs.”
In India, Judge and his firm are helping two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Rajat Rakkhit
and Jay Sethuram, with funding from Trident Capital, to build a nationwide digital
advertising firm, Elucido Media Networks. Elucido is similar in structure to China’s
Focus Media Holding, a rollup of regional advertising companies plus flat-panel display and
transmission technology. Rakkhit has held strategic positions with Cypress Semiconductor,
Advanced Micro Devices, and NASA; Sethuram worked at Intel, National Semiconductor Corp.,
and AT&T Bell Labs, and later founded two companies, Cerent and Stratum One, that were
acquired by Cisco.
In California’s Searles Valley, 170 miles east of Los Angeles, Wilson Sonsini and Indian
Counsel AZB Partners advised Gujarat-based Nirma Ltd. in the acquisition of Searles
Valley Minerals Inc. (SVM) in December 2007. SVM is one of five U.S. producers of
soda ash (accounting for 10% of the U.S. soda ash market), and the acquisition makes Nirma the
seventh largest soda ash producer in the world. A sizable portion of SVM’s output is shipped by
rail to the ports of Long Beach and San Diego for export.
In IP licensing, joint ventures, and M&A, many Indian companies are still on a learning curve.
Foreign partners often hesitate to enter into agreements, lacking the necessary level of assurance that
they will not find themselves tied up in court for years trying to enforce otherwise routine contracts.
As Orrick partner Neel Chatterjee, an IP specialist, told an August 2006 Delhi legal seminar:
In the medium term (1–3 years), the civil justice process will need to address
complex cases in the technology transactions area. Indian companies have been
signing very high dollar value outsourcing deals, technology transactions, and
joint venture deals over the past several years. These deals are often framed
without fully understanding the business complexity or multinational legal
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