Leading alternative legal services provider (ALSP) Elevate has acquired IP research company Sagacious IP, with co-founders Anant Kataria and Tarun Bansal joining the Elevate management team along with its staff of 500 IP professionals.

Founded in 2008 in India, Sagacious’s tech tools help law firms and companies with patent and trademark searching and monitoring, and other aspects like patent drafting, monetisation and licensing.

This is US-based Elevate’s third acquisition in nine months, with the printing and publishing company CJK Group arriving in May and data security outfit Redgrave Data joining in September 2024.

Commenting on the deal, Liam Brown, Elevate’s chairman and CEO, said: “Just as with our two previous acquisitions in the previous nine months, our combination with Sagacious reflects our strategy to offer expertise and technology to innovate and transform work with a legal and business dimension that needs to be done every day, often at scale.”

Well-established Sagacious helps customers, which include Fortune 500 companies and IAM Patent1000-listed law firms, defend and monetise their IP.

Its workforce has expertise in diverse technology areas including ICT, engineering, automotive, life sciences and chemistry. These IP professionals are trained in US, European and other IP laws and have multilingual expertise, including Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Brown noted that IP is exactly the sort of critical “run-the-business” legal activity other Elevate offerings address. He continued: “With IP management being increasingly important to businesses, the Sagacious expertise, capabilities and technology will be of immediate interest to many of our existing and potential customers.”

Anant Kataria, a Sagacious co-founder, said: “The IP needs of organisations do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are one component of overall legal and business activities.”

The other Sagacious co-founder, Tarun Bansal, added: “As part of Elevate, we are now able to serve existing customers and gain new ones with a robust set of complementary offerings that reflect the broader context in which IP exists.”

In December, Elevate partnered with Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) to launch the law firm’s new and enhanced alumni talent network. The network connects former HSF lawyers, paralegals and legal operations professionals with opportunities to work with the firm’s clients in a flexible capacity.

According to research by Thomson Reuters, published earlier this week, the ALSP market is growing at a much faster rate than the traditional law firm segment, reaching a total value of $28.5bn in 2023.