The community
Beck Greener is committed to supporting voluntary and charitable activities in the community.
The cornerstone of our Community CSR programme is the STEM: Branching Out project, aimed at promoting STEM careers and raising the profile of the IP profession, while also providing our staff with opportunities to develop their skills in areas such as communication and leadership.
Under the project, we are part of the STEM Ambassadors Programme, established by STEM Learning UK. We also introduced a pro bono scheme, working with students to prepare and file UK patent applications for inventions arising from school science projects, and we run insight workshops and enhanced work experience placements for students.
We also allow one day’s paid leave annually for volunteering and actively encourage staff to make use of this time, as well as identifying charities with which non-fee-earning staff can get involved, and offering payroll giving so that staff can make regular charitable donations in a more cost-effective manner.
Our food bank collection scheme has proved very successful, while we raise money each year through Jeans for Genes Day and Christmas Jumper Day, as well as contributing annually to the Benevolent Societies of our Chartered Institutes, CITMA and CIPA.
In our role as IP attorneys, we believe that high quality IP advice should be available to all, and to this end we run a service, aimed primarily at individuals and SMEs, which provides free initial IP consultations, and also assist in clinics providing free advice to the public.
We contribute to the CIPA Guide to the Patents Act, and provide a monthly segment for the CIPA Journal reporting recent cases from the English courts and the CJEU. In October 2015, our team was awarded the CIPA Journal Editor’s Award for their contributions to the various publications.
