Green queen: Eleanor Maciver, Mewburn Ellis
The newly appointed sustainability champion at Mewburn Ellis explains to Sarah Speight how the firm is gaining recognition for its environmental work.
Mewburn Ellis means business when it comes to sustainability.
Shortly after appointing partner Eleanor Maciver as its first sustainability champion, the firm announced that it had been awarded a silver medal from sustainability ratings provider EcoVadis, making it the first UK-based IP firm to receive this accolade.
This coincided with another first: the publication of its Sustainable Communities report, which spotlights the firm’s progress over the past five years on inclusion and diversity; gender pay gap; community giving; and environmental sustainability, including its carbon footprint.
True sustainability goes beyond taking care of the environment, such as enabling inclusivity. Mewburn’s recent moves in this area include creating a chief inclusion and diversity officer role on its board ( Robert Andrews, WIPR 2022 Diversity Champion), and launching a firmwide menopause policy—thought to be the first of its kind in the European IP sector.
So what now for the firm’s sustainability strategy? Enter Maciver, whose appointment as sustainability champion is something she is visibly excited about. In fact, she exudes a passion for her job overall.
From academic research to IP
After joining Mewburn in 2013, Maciver qualified as a chartered patent attorney and European patent attorney four years later, focusing her practice on chemical patents. Earlier this year she became a partner.
But prior to her IP career, Maciver worked in academic research. After achieving a master’s degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University (specialising in chemistry) and a DPhil in organic chemistry from Oxford University, she carried out post-doctoral research at Oxford and Kyoto in Japan.
Research is something she doesn’t miss but she still has ties to that world, working with university clients in the UK and globally, alongside those in the private sector.
This is where Maciver can put her chemistry experience into practice, and is clearly fired up by the subject.
“There's quite a lot of really interesting green innovation in the chemical field, from new materials such as sustainable plastics or plastic alternatives and new battery technologies to future foods such as alternative proteins,” she says.
“I enjoy doing that kind of work. It’s easy to doom-scroll sometimes, but it is heartening to see that there are some seriously clever people in the world trying to help solve some of these problems.”
Maciver says she is excited to be in a position to shape the firm’s sustainability agenda, part of which will be setting and reaching ambitious sustainability goals.
Her primary focus as sustainability champion will be on the environmental aspects of sustainability, and encouraging everyone at the firm to participate. She is keen to stress, though, that others have equally important roles to play.
“I should say that lots of people were already quite on board,” she says. “I was away when the award was announced, and I came back to a flurry of emails from people wanting to get involved.
“We need to engage as a business. And that will be one of the next steps of our journey.”
A broad topic
Maciver explains that sustainability is a broad term and means different things to different people. While her focus is on the environmental side, the firm has lots of activity in other areas too, as detailed in its Sustainable Communities report.
The report summarises what the firm has been doing over the past three years in this area. “We wanted to showcase our Forward Community Programme, which covers our charity work, inclusion and diversity and the environment,” explains Maciver.
“When you start thinking about sustainability, you realise that it's incredibly complicated. There are lots of things that contribute to it that you maybe don't think about. So our report helps draw all this together.”
She explains that one of the reasons behind producing the report was that clients are now asking questions about how the firm is handling areas such as inclusion, diversity, and reducing its carbon footprint.
And, she says, there’s more to producing a sustainability report than one might imagine, again emphasising that it’s a team effort.
“It sounds really simple to say for example, ‘we're going to work out our carbon footprint’. And then it turns out that it involves enormous spreadsheets and vast amounts of data and time to work out what your carbon footprint is; it's really very complicated.”
Green accolade
Receiving the EcoVadis award “was a bit of a surprise” says Maciver. “We hoped we'd done well, but we were very pleased with the silver medal—the work we've put in over the last few years has really paid off.”
EcoVadis assesses sustainability by examining a business’s performance in metrics such as environment, social and governance. The assessment is based on a customised questionnaire linked to industry, country and size, and results in an actionable scorecard.
She explains that the company submitted “huge amounts” of information on everything the company is doing that might have an impact on sustainability, such as its actions on the environment, ethics, labour and human rights, and sustainable procurement.
Mewburn will now use the areas that EcoVadis flagged up to highlight where it has weaknesses in its policies. “Some of that is around things that we already do but in a more ad hoc, less formalised way,” she adds.
“In order to really showcase what we do in these areas and for EcoVadis to take that into account, they need to see more formal policies, which we now plan to put in place. We also need to focus on measurement and key performance indicators. These are some of the easy fixes we are working on now.”
External validation
In response to the question of how valid an external rating really is to a business, Maciver says that it’s a way of providing standards towards which everyone can work.
“In an ideal world, if companies were doing everything they needed to do, and they all had the expertise to know everything they needed to do, then maybe you wouldn't need external ratings.
“From our perspective, independent validation is very important for a couple of reasons. Our clients are asking us to take part in these kinds of rankings.”
She adds that rankings are important to employees and help attract talent. “Our recent set of graduates have commented on how impressed they’ve been with our focus on this area. It sets us apart in the IP profession.”
That said, she acknowledges that sustainability is a complex issue and it’s “not always easy to see the wood for the trees”.
“We're not experts in being sustainable. In the last six months, I've been surprised by how many things you need to think about in terms of sustainability and just how broad a term it can be. Even just in the context of the environment, it’s not simple.
“A lot of people think it's about ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. And that really is very important. But it's not the only thing and having the expertise even in a business our size to do that analysis and make change internally isn't easy.”
Future focus
Maciver explains that Mewburn’s short-term goal will be to try to achieve a gold medal from EcoVadis next year.
“In order to get there, we've got some changes to make and we’re working on these initiatives already,” she confirms.
Mewburn plans to focus on areas highlighted by EcoVadis, including reporting and putting key performance indicators in place; creating more practical plans concerning environmental issues; and looking at its external procurement, where the firm is planning more rigorous policies.
“Most of these are a combination of little things that aren't really going to be a massive sea change. One of the biggest changes is actually going to be around internal messaging and more practical plans around our environmental goals.
“I use ‘environmental’ very specifically to mean things like recycling and waste management, what comes in and out of our offices, and our greenhouse gas emissions, that kind of thing.”
In the longer term, as the firm states in its Sustainable Communities report, Mewburn has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by 2025.
The greenwashing issue
Maciver agrees that greenwashing, the act of making unsubstantiated claims about a company’s environmental credentials, is an issue of credibility for businesses.
“The last thing we want is to be thought of as greenwashing,” she insists. “Without the right knowledge and support within a business, some companies might greenwash without entirely realising what they’re doing and sadly some businesses might greenwash for commercial gain.”
The motivation for Mewburn is “a genuine desire to do better with a focus on making real change”, she says. “But we’re learning here, so if we are potentially not doing something that we should be, the hope is that by using these external ranking organisations we can do better.
“At the heart of our approach is a focus on doing the right thing and being a good corporate citizen; we think the hard work we’ve done over the past four or five years demonstrates the firm’s commitment to achieving this goal.
“It’s important to us to follow through in our commitments and not make empty promises.”
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