28th October 2020
Keltie is an intellectual property firm
Keltie can handle all of your intellectual property needs, including registering trade marks to cover your brand, protecting your aesthetic creations with design registrations, and securing patents for your technical inventions.
INTERVIEW WITH MARK CALLAGHAN
Keltie is an intellectual property firm that can handle all of your intellectual property needs, including registering trade marks to cover your brand, protecting your aesthetic creations with design registrations, and securing patents for your technical inventions. We support companies and individuals at all stages in protecting their innovation and growing their business.
Keltie is a firm with a unique personality. With a top-10 ranking in the Financial Times Special Report on Europe’s Leading Patent Law Firms 2020, Keltie is renowned for its excellence. That reputation has been earned by putting talented, energetic and principled people at its heart.
Based in Europe, but with global reach, we specialise in intellectual property law and management, but the essence of Keltie goes far beyond what we do. It’s about how we do it: with an unparalleled spirit of togetherness, fairness and enjoyment, and the drive inspired by Keltie’s founder, the late David Keltie, who wanted to “create something amazing”. This includes a commitment to sustainability, both outwardly, in terms of actively supporting the work of others that relates to sustainability, and inwardly, by ensuring that our operations meet the highest levels of social and environmental responsibility. This extends to promoting recycling, flexible working, cycle-to-work schemes and the use of fair trade products and energy efficient devices in our offices.
We caught up with Mark Callaghan, who will be Keltie’s point of contact for Produced in Kent and will put together a series of IP support sessions for members from October 2020 onwards.
- Why is Keltie keen to work with Pink in particular?
Whilst we work with businesses of all shapes and sizes, from large corporates to individuals with a solo project, we find it can be particularly rewarding to support smaller and medium-sized companies, such as members of PinK, for whom intellectual property (IP) can be of vital importance and where the path to IP protection, and the development of an appropriate IP strategy, is so varied and nuanced. We enjoy the excitement of watching the business of our clients grow and being influential in that growth path. We also have several of our attorneys based in Kent and keen to support local enterprise. Finally, the focus on sustainability at PinK is something that resonates with us, and indeed we are actively expanding the work that we are involved with that relates to sustainability.
- Pink members are faced with many challenges post-Covid: continuing social distancing regulations, no physical events to meet customers and buyers, lost B2B trade, threats of further lockdowns, a potential hard Brexit – how important is IP advice and support in this volatile economic climate?
Protecting your IP is always important, whether to secure the brand that you have invested time and energy building or to prevent competitors from copying the products that you have developed. It is also always highly advisable to seek advice from an IP professional to ensure that you obtain the protection that you need, which is rarely straightforward. For many, the current disruption makes this more important than ever to ensure that they are in the strongest possible position once things start to recover. It has also been a time for some businesses to focus energy on new ideas and developments, away from the pressures of more usual business patterns. There are many strategies with IP protection which are designed to help businesses facing financial challenge or those in the early stages of funding or development (for example discounts for companies of smaller size, cost delaying tactics when seeking protection for IP), so the constraints of this time shouldn’t be seen as a reason not to invest in IP; rather, there has never been a better time to do so!
- What positives have come out of the Covid crisis that you feel our members, with your support, can build on going forward?
One of the main positives to the break from our normal routines has been the opportunity to reflect on our usual practices and to focus on aspects of our work that are usually difficult to find time for. For many of our clients, this has enabled them to take a fresh look at their business to consider the IP that they have created and to capture the associated value in that IP by registering it.
