Janakan L. Thiagarajah

Janakan founded Bellwether with the goal of providing clients with the expertise, resourcefulness, and experience typically associated with large law firms, but through a flexible model allowing for personal attention, client-specific strategies, and affordability, to maximize the value returned from clients' investment in legal counsel and consultancy.

The decision to launch Bellwether Law turned on what the Firm was situated to deliver: insight and skills from fortunate opportunities over the previous decade of high level experiences in the different areas of the law.

Janakan started his career as an attorney with Kirkland and Ellis LLP, an international law firm, in its Washington, DC office. While at Kirkland, Janakan represented a variety of companies across industries, including: Honeywell International, General Motors Company, The Hershey Company, Abbott Laboratories, The Raytheon Company, Volkswagen, BASF, Wyndham Hotels, Lightsquared, and Harbinger Capital.

Before pursuing law, Janakan had spent several years as a researcher in biochemistry, pursuing his Master’s degree—and while the shift to law was not strategic to capitalize on those years of science, analyzing legal and business issues through a scientific approach has proven effective across the different areas of research, due diligence, and analysis.

​In later years, Janakan returned to the traditional and typical paths of a science background—as represented by Bellwether's current practice areas in business and corporate law, regulatory and compliance, and intellectual property. And as it worked out, the start in complex commercial and regulatory litigation was fortuitous: it was the perfect landing spot for really testing and developing versatility in research; and it proved the ideal launching pad for a much broader practice experience.

From grappling with arcane legal issues like crafting arguments to analogize FCC regulations to English Common Law riparian rights; to hard sciences like ballistic vest R&D or nanotechnology for litigation expert reports; to social sciences going to fact arguments, analyzing commodities futures strategies or developing counter surveys and polling in validating false advertising defenses. These insights and a knack for research and analysis ultimately opened the doors to what has been a gratifyingly diverse experience across practice areas.

And it's this experience that forged the path for Bellwether Law.