by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Two Jacksonville attorneys are about to go global.
Attorneys Ashwin Sharma and Ana Rosa Leimbach will begin a new Jacksonville-based law firm this month specializing in immigration law and corporate outsourcing. The firm, Leimbach and Associates, will have an office in the San Jose area with associates in Calgary, Canada, London and in three major cities in India, said Sharma.
Sharma said the new firm will be one of the first of its kind in the United States.
Essentially, it will be a full service immigration firm with a wide variety of outsourcing capabilities for U.S. companies that want to send production abroad, especially to India, he said.
For example, if an American business client wanted to outsource some of its production to India, they would have to work through an Indian lawyer as well as individual Indian agents for insurance, human resources and real estate. Sharma said there are currently no U.S. firms that can offer such a client all of those services.
“They are going to have to go to seek separate companies for each of those things,” he said. “When they come to us we can get them the package, we can quote them the price and we can make it happen. A to Z.”
Through his travel experiences and prior experience working with immigration law, Sharma said he has made connections with people around the world that routinely deal with U.S. outsourcing in India. By forming the new firm, Sharma and Leimbach have solidified and formalized many of those foreign connections to create a global network of outsourcing and immigration law professionals.
“In addition to our lawyers over there, we have connections to specialists like insurance advisors and bankers that can assist our clients,” he said. “We can hook them up with HR people. We have real estate people over there that can help them find the location that they are looking for.”
Sharma also said the new firm is ahead of other immigration law firms due to its strong ties with Indian law through the firms’s associate attorneys in India.
“Not too many U.S. firms are well versed in Indian law,” he said. “For Indian law, you have got to go to the Indian lawyer so you are not guaranteed the same amount of reliability or guidelines that you have here. By having a firm that has its feet planted in two different countries, you get the advantage of having a firm that is bound by bar association rules and regulations so you get more of an ethical sort of service.”
Besides the firm’s outsourcing focus, Sharma said Leimbach and Associates will also offer a wide variety of immigration services through their new firm.
Sharma said he also believes that it is important to be able to deal with clients in their native tongue. That shouldn’t be a problem for either Sharma or Leimbach, between them, they are fluent in English, Spanish, French and three different Indian languages - Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi.
While many people would associate immigration with Ellis Island in New York, Sharma said he and Leimbach are able to open their global firm in Jacksonville because most of their work doesn’t require face-to-face meetings.
“With immigration law, you can pretty much do from anywhere because it is a federal question and you don’t necessarily even need to meet the person in person in order to do their immigration,” he said.
“Everything can be done with email and faxes. And the type of clientele that we have are mainly IT workers who understand and are comfortable with those mediums of communication.”