Businesses Told Not to Give Up on Soviet Negotiations : Joint ventures: Two Moscow lawyers advise Orange County businessmen to continue efforts to develop relationships despite the Kremlin’s rapid changes in laws affecting those arrangements.

Intercon Development Services, a computer software company in San Bernardino, thought it time to get on the Soviet-trade bandwagon and began negotiations on commercializing a Soviet private enterprise’s technology in the West.

But negotiations, begun last year, went in fits and starts as changing laws in the Soviet Union played havoc on the negotiating parties. The deal has yet to be signed and the Kremlin is talking about passing new joint venture laws.

Thomas Owens, Intercon’s senior vice president of marketing, said that keeping up with changes in Soviet joint venture laws has become a major task.

But U.S. companies in Orange County and elsewhere seeking joint ventures with Soviet enterprises should not be intimidated by the rapidly changing laws coming out of the Kremlin, according to two Soviet lawyers who specialize in their nation’s joint venture laws.

“Laws are being passed as problems arise,” said Nina Belyaeva, a lawyer with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “For example, the new law on property, passed in March, will bring joint ventures to a higher level, (allowing) private enterprises to own their products and workers (to) become shareholders of factories they work in.”

Belyaeva and her husband, Shota Kakabeadve, who is also a lawyer, are visiting Orange County this week to meet with companies interested in doing business with the Soviets.

Orange County companies should find a wealth of business opportunities as the Soviet government slowly loosens its grip on the nation’s economy, she said in an interview Wednesday in Newport Beach. One particular change that bears watching by U.S. businesses is Soviet policy toward access to raw materials.

Currently, state-owned enterprises buy raw materials, such as fuel or machine parts, at “cut-rate prices,” while private cooperatives pay at least three times more for the same goods, said Kakabeadve, a partner in the Moscow law firm Justitsiya, one of a handful of private law firms in the Soviet Union.

This disparity is giving way to rising tensions between budding enterprises and the government bureaucracy that controls the flow of raw materials in the country. These tensions will likely come to a head in a few months, and “the government will have to deregulate supplies, and the state’s hold on the economy will have to be reduced,” Belyaeva predicted.

Until this is resolved, she added, Orange County businesses looking to start a joint venture in the Soviet Union are better off with a Soviet joint venture partner that has guaranteed access to raw materials.

Paul R. Lawrence, Harvard Business School’s Donham Professor of Organizational Behavior, agreed, noting that the current government structure “in a way excludes some of the cooperatives; many are too weak, too new to be practical joint venture partners.”

Judy B. Rosener, a professor of management at UC Irvine, who arranged for Belyaeva and Kakabeadve’s visit, said the couple came to see Orange County’s entrepreneurs at work.

“There’s a lack of understanding of the whole concept of entrepreneurship in the Soviet Union and we have a lot of entrepreneurs . . . venture capitalists working with start-up companies and people who are risk-takers,” she said. “Orange County is like a pioneer land to them.”

More important, Soviet interests want to modernize their telecommunications, food processing and hospitality industries and revamp their management systems, she added, and Orange County has become a hotbed for these industries.