Our Values

We have made a commitment to give 1% of our profits and over 300 days of time to charity each year.

Community is important to Mewburn Ellis. For us this means nurturing our people, helping everyone develop and contributing to the wider communities in which we operate, as well as supporting worthy causes with time and money. As a firm we have made a commitment to donate 1% of our profits to charity as well as over 300 days of time to good causes.

We support charities at a firmwide and local office level and do this through our Forward Community Programme Charity Fund. We are currently supporting the British Science Association as our firmwide charity as well as The Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal and Save the Children Emergency Fund. We also have a local charity for each office which has been chosen by our people.

Everyone that works at Mewburn Ellis has one community day per year to enable them to support causes they care about. In addition we operate a Give As You Earn (GAYE) scheme, so our people can donate to charities of their choice in a simple and tax effective way. Our combined community effort has amounted to more than £600,000 of investment since 2020.

This is in addition to our more ad hoc fund raising activity, where we have supported charities and events such as Genes for Jeans, Children in Need and Save the Children. We are also an active supporter of UK Youth, a leading national charity, committed to providing access to appropriate, high quality services in every community so that young people are empowered to build bright futures, regardless of their background or circumstances.

We also donate all of our old desktop PCs to the charity PCrefurb an independent not-for-profit community group with the aim of engaging the IT skills of vulnerable and hard-to-reach individuals to “rescue” unwanted IT equipment. They refurbish donated IT equipment and redistribute it to those most in need, helping people connect with training and education and to support their well-being.  So far we have donated 58 desktops and 16 monitors with more to come. Our commitment to supporting the work that PCrefurb do means that many more vulnerable people will be helped to get online.

We also make donations in emergency situations and in the past two years have donated to Coronavirus related charities to cover appeals for help in a range of areas as well as fund to support on the ground in Afghanistan and victims of the Ukraine War. 

We recognise that we have a responsibility to ensure our business has a positive impact on the people, communities and environment around us.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is important to us. The success of our business relies upon our ability to attract, train and retain the best people. We support diversity throughout our business and make every effort to create and maintain an inclusive culture. We recognise our responsibilities in the community and encourage our people to engage in activities that better society and build trust in our local communities. As a forward-looking firm, we understand the importance of minimising our environmental impact. Therefore we are committed to facilitating environmentally friendly working practices by our people and in our offices.

The concept of CSR is in our opinion under developed in our profession. We don’t want to just do what is required like many other firms – but go above and beyond. We have built our business over 150 years by looking ahead and adapting and changing at the right times. Thinking about the future of our planet and society, being a good corporate citizen and doing our bit to make a difference is a high priority for the firm.

Our recent rebrand was to capture what we believe is at the very heart of our firm – being forward-looking. To be a truly forward-looking firm, community must be at the very heart of our culture. We are at the beginning of an exciting journey to develop what we believe will be a vital community programme to deliver our CSR initiatives. 

We aim to be a carbon neutral business by 2025

We believe we must play our part in reducing the use of energy, lowering carbon emissions and reducing waste and actively avoid causing environmental damage. Sustainability is a complex area and a ongoing focus for our firm. Our priority is to make sure that the way we operate has as little environmental impact as possible.

We are looking at how we deal with waste, energy and reducing our carbon footprint, with the objective to eliminate our use if we can, reduce where possible or substitute if necessary. This is a broad approach and covers everything from how we manage our offices to the travel we undertake the decisions we make about the suppliers and products we use.

We have developed a five step climate action plan that we're using as a framework to help us improve in this key area. Some steps are long-term and will take time, others are quicker wins that we're implementing now. All are tangible, a priority for us and part of our business plan with board level support.

Five Step Climate Action Plan

1. We will ask questions and be accountable

We are currently analysing our carbon footprint to understand what it is now and importantly what it was pre Covid. From our new financial year in April 2022, we will track our carbon footprint on an ongoing basis as part of our standard business reporting.

This is important to us so we can understand how and where we need to improve. We will ask ourselves the tough questions and challenge our approach and behaviours to reduce our footprint as much as possible. What we can't change, we will offset. 

2. We will be carbon neutral by 2025

Our aim is to be carbon neutral by 2025 which will be well before the UK target of 2050. This will be a combination of changing our working practices and off-setting our carbon footprint. We will be using our carbon footprint data to enable us to pinpoint specific areas that we need to target.

We know that our travel is a significant contributor to our carbon footprint. We will now look at the impact of our trips and introduce a 'Sustainability Sense Check' to question transport choice, business need and perceived value. We plan to be clever, use time and resources wisely and only travel when necessary.

3. We will plant a tree for every new matter we open and create a Mewburn Ellis Forest

We have decided to plant a tree for every new matter we open. The right tree in the right place, The Mewburn Ellis Forest is managed by responsible partners in a sustainable way is an important part of tackling the climate crisis. We are supporting the planting of native and biodiverse mix of tree species in planting sites around the world including the UK. These planting projects also help to support local communities and reduce poverty by employing local workers. 

4. We will enable and support the sustainability conversation and take personal responsibility

We believe that showcasing the good work of our clients and ensuring there is focus on the conversation around sustainability is an important part of the puzzle. We have recently launched our Green IP Report. and are talking extensively about this topic in our sustainability blogs and Green Tech spotlight page. We also plan to create an internal Sustainability Group made up of people that want to get involved with this initiative within the firm who can help identify and drive forward sustainability initiatives at the firm.

5. We will support sustainability charities as part of our Forward Community Programme

As part of our community programme we donate a percentage of our funds each year to sustainable charities to support and reach areas that we cannot directly impact. We already give 1% of our profits to charity each year which amounts to over £150,000 and believe it's important that some of this money supports sustainability goals too.

200 TONNES OF CARBON REDUCED SO FAR

As part of our commitment to be carbon neutral by 2025 we are working to reduce and offset our carbon use. We have chosen to offset 200tCO2e of carbon so far via renewables and forestry. We will be supporting more projects in coming months.

PROJECT ONE: 60 tCO2e - Protecting the Tambopata-Bahuaja Biodiversity Reserve in Peru

The project is implemented on the ground by the Peruvian NGO, AIDER. The project prevents deforestation and provides tropical rainforest habitat for an incredible variety of rare and endangered wildlife by creating an economic buffer zone around a 591,119 hectare forest to protect rainforest area and provides local people with forest-friendly and sustainable livelihoods. 

PROJECT TWO: 140 tCO2e - Wind Power Project in Thailand

This project is situated in the Nongwang, Bueng Prue and Samnaktakhro sub-districts of Thepharak District, Nakhonratchasima Province in Thailand. The project site is Northeast of Bangkok, and is a greenfield project, meaning that no prior activity was installed before the commissioning of this project. The purpose of this project is to generate clean electricity through the utilisation of wind energy by implementing 90 megawatts (MW) of wind power from 30 Wind Turbine Generators (WTGs) of an individual capacity of 3 MW each. In this project, energy from wind is converted into mechanical energy and subsequently transformed into electrical energy.