Full-spectrum intellectual property management from invention to enforcement. 100+ patents delivered — including bringing dozens of first-time inventors to market.
Most patent problems presented as legal problems are engineering problems wearing legal clothing. A claim is too narrow because the drafter did not understand which element was actually inventive. A freedom-to-operate opinion is inconclusive because nobody mapped the accused product's construction against the claim element by element. An examiner's obviousness objection goes unanswered because the technical reason the combination would not have worked was never articulated by someone who could have articulated it.
This is the work the practice does. NaraNova provides patent and IP services in India and for cross-border portfolios: the technical analysis, claim architecture, search strategy, infringement and design-around reasoning, and inventor-facing work that determine whether a patent is worth holding — and the drafting, filing and prosecution that follow from it.
Drafting and prosecution are handled end to end. Specifications and claim sets are written in-house by the engineers who did the technical analysis, which is the whole point: a claim drafted by someone who has not read the prior art in the original is a claim that will narrow under examination. Filing and prosecution proceed through registered patent agents, and where a jurisdiction requires local representation the practice engages associates who provide it. Examination reports are answered on the technical merits rather than by amendment of convenience.
The practice takes the cross-border work as one mandate rather than a series of national filings. One priority application carried into the jurisdictions that matter, with freedom-to-operate run alongside rather than after, and the opposition windows — pre-grant and post-grant — treated as part of the timeline from the outset rather than as an unpleasant surprise.
A specification is a technical document with a legal function. Its quality is decided before any claim is written, at the point where someone identifies what the invention actually is — which is usually narrower than the inventor's description and broader than the embodiment they built.
Drafting work starts with invention harvesting: sitting with the engineering team, separating the inventive concept from the implementation detail, and establishing which features are essential to the technical effect and which are optional. Claim architecture then builds outward — an independent claim at the level of the concept, dependent claims that capture commercially meaningful embodiments and provide fallback positions for prosecution, and a specification with enough disclosure to support amendment without adding matter. For applications that will enter Europe, added-matter discipline is applied from the first draft, because the European approach to amendment support is unforgiving of a specification written only for Indian and US practice.
Indian subject-matter exclusions are addressed at drafting rather than after a first examination report. Section 3(k) for computer-related inventions and Section 3(d) for known-substance claims determine how a control-system or materials invention should be framed, and the framing is far easier to get right at the outset than to argue into place later.
Prosecution support means preparing the technical response: analysing the cited art properly, establishing what it actually discloses as opposed to what the examiner's summary says it discloses, constructing the technical argument for non-obviousness on a problem-solution basis, and drafting amendments that preserve commercial scope. The response is filed by the client's agent.
| Item | Position under the Patents Rules as amended in 2024 |
|---|---|
| Request for examination | 31 months from priority or filing date |
| Foreign filing particulars (Form 3, Section 8) | Within three months of the first statement of objections; the Controller may consult accessible databases |
| Statement of working (Form 27) | Once every three financial years, within six months of the end of the third financial year |
| Pre-grant opposition (Section 25(1), Rule 55) | Controller first determines whether a prima facie case is made out |
| Post-grant opposition (Section 25(2)) | Within twelve months from publication of grant |
| Renewal fees | Ten per cent reduction where at least four years are paid in advance electronically |
| Foreign filing by Indian residents | Permission under Section 39 required where no Indian application has been on file for six weeks |
The Section 39 point catches Indian subsidiaries of European groups regularly. An invention made in India by India-resident inventors cannot be filed first abroad without either a prior Indian filing plus six weeks, or written permission. Group filing policies that route everything through a European head office need to account for it.
Freedom-to-operate analysis for electrical equipment has a specific difficulty: the relevant art is spread across mechanical, materials and electrical classifications, and a great deal of the significant art is in utility-model-style filings and in languages other than English. A search that relies on English-language keyword queries against a single database will look clean and be wrong.
The practice runs FTO on a classification-led basis first — the specific CPC and IPC groups covering, for example, cable joints and terminations, switchgear enclosures, insulator construction, overhead line equipment or battery module architecture — then extends with keyword and citation-network searching, and validates coverage by checking that known art in the field is retrieved by the query set.
Each candidate reference is then charted. The product's construction is broken into features and mapped element by element against the independent claims, with the claim construed as it reads rather than as the title suggests. Where an element is not present, the analysis states so and identifies whether an equivalence argument is available. Legal status and family position are checked per jurisdiction — a patent granted in Germany and lapsed for non-payment of annuities in India changes the sourcing question entirely, and national phase entries frequently do not mirror the priority filing.
The deliverable is a technical clearance analysis with a risk-ranked reference list and the reasoning fully exposed, prepared so that the client's counsel can build a formal opinion on it. The practice does not issue the opinion itself.
Patentability search is the cheapest decision-quality improvement available in an IP programme, and it is routinely skipped. A properly scoped search before drafting either identifies the closest art so the claims can be positioned around it, or establishes that the concept is already public and saves the filing and prosecution spend entirely.
Searches are scoped explicitly — databases covered, classification groups, languages, non-patent literature sources including standards documents, CIGRE and IEEE material, conference proceedings and supplier catalogues, which for industrial equipment are often where the disabling disclosure sits. The report states what was searched and what was not, because a search report without a stated boundary cannot be relied on.
When a competitor's patent blocks a commercially attractive configuration, the productive question is not whether the patent is valid but which claim element is the one that must be avoided, and whether the technical function that element performs can be achieved by a different mechanism.
The method is: construe the independent claims, identify the element with the narrowest and most literal recitation, establish what physical function that element performs in the claimed combination, and then generate alternatives that deliver the function through a different physical principle. This is where the practice's TRIZ work is directly applicable — a claim element is a stated solution to an underlying problem, and the tools for generating alternative solutions to a stated problem are exactly what TRIZ provides. The output is a set of candidate configurations, each with a technical non-infringement rationale that counsel can assess, and each evaluated for whether it is itself patentable.
Industrial design protection under the Designs Act is under-used by Indian industrial manufacturers, and it is the fastest and cheapest right available for products whose commercial identity resides in shape and configuration — enclosure forms, insulator profiles, connector and fitting geometry. Registration protects features of shape, configuration, pattern and ornamentation judged solely by the eye, and cannot protect a feature dictated purely by function. That boundary determines how the representations should be prepared, which views to file, and how much of the article to disclaim, and it is worth deciding deliberately rather than by default.
Opposition and revocation proceedings are won on technical evidence. The practice prepares the technical case: identifying the most damaging prior art, constructing the obviousness argument as a documented chain rather than an assertion, drafting the technical portions of the opposition, preparing claim charts, and where insufficiency is in issue, establishing precisely what a skilled person could not have performed from the specification as filed.
In litigation, the practice supports counsel with infringement and validity analysis, technical explanation of the field for the court, review of the opposing expert's technical positions, and expert technical testimony where instructed. Independence is maintained: the analysis says what the evidence supports, and if it does not support the client's position the client is told before it is filed rather than after it is cross-examined.
Portfolios accumulate. A ten-year-old portfolio typically contains a group of assets aligned to current products, a group that reads on products the company has exited, and a group nobody can explain. Audit work maps each asset against current and planned products, against competitor activity, and against renewal cost, producing a prune, keep, or licence-out recommendation for each family. Renewal spend released by pruning frequently funds the next two years of filing.
Licensing and cross-border transfer work supplies the technical definition that makes an agreement operable: what is being licensed, what the field of use covers in engineering terms, what the know-how package contains, and how improvements are defined and attributed. Commercial and legal terms are settled by the parties and their counsel.
Trade secret structuring covers the decision that precedes all of it — whether to patent or to hold. Where the invention is a process that cannot be detected in the product, and where independent development is unlikely within the patent term, holding is often the better answer. That decision has consequences: access control, documented confidentiality obligations, supplier restrictions, and an evidence trail sufficient to establish the secret's existence and the reasonable steps taken to protect it.
Engineers in industrial firms generate patentable subject matter continuously and file almost none of it, usually because they believe an improvement is too incremental to be inventive, or because the disclosure process feels like a legal ordeal. Coaching addresses both: what the inventive step threshold actually requires, how to recognise a disclosable improvement, how to write an invention disclosure that a drafter can work from, and what a claim is for. Firms that run this well shift from filing occasionally to filing from the design process itself.
The practice's record includes 100+ patents delivered (including PCT filings) across nine industrial verticals. NaraNova Tech LLP, incorporated May 2026 and based in Vadodara, Gujarat, is registered under Startup India / DPIIT (DIPP271026) and Udyam (UDYAM-GJ-24-0239773), and is GST registered.
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