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Mike Mellor, Pryor Cashman s Chief Marketing and Business
Development Officer joined Jennifer Simpson Carr
and Timothy B. Corcoran to pen an article for
Law360 on the future of business development in the
legal industry.
Jennifer is director of business development at Furia Rubel
Communications Inc. Timothy is principal at Corcoran
Consulting Group LLC.
The global COVID-19 pandemic unearthed a rift between the way
law firms categorize and go to market with practice groups and how
clients view the consultative relationship.
At most law firms, traditional business development and client
Wall Street) and Jordon Belfort (
The Wolf of Wall Street), it also cemented America’s standing as both a global trade leader and the world’s largest national economy.
These days, however, big business is no longer focused on its business. Instead, in the wake of last year’s racial unrest, corporate powerhouses seem more concerned with providing public mea culpas on their historic failure to be sufficiently “woke.”
Self-inflicted floggings appear regularly within professional sports, where the Cleveland Indians have dropped their “Chief Wahoo” logo and have promised to follow in the footsteps of “The Washington Football Club” in dropping their longstanding team moniker as well.
(AP Photo, File)
Poor Coca-Cola. The company jumped on the woke train recently with a few moves that went public.
First, Coca-Cola was outed for sending their employees to training on how to be “less white.” It turned out that this was not internal training. Instead, LinkedIn provided it through a learning link and the company assigned it. The backlash to this disclosure caused LinkedIn to remove the training, but plenty of vendors are available to conduct it internally if that is Coke’s preference.
Coca-Cola also sent a notification to their legal firms to tell them that they would monitor their outside legal teams’ diversity. If a firm does not meet the standards for workforce diversity specified by Coca-Cola, it will receive a rate that is 30% lower. According to an interview with General Counsel Bradley Gayton, who sent the letter:
Coca-Cola: Company Will Only Hire Law Firms That Meet at Least 30% Diversity Quotas
14 Mar 2021
Coca-Cola’s legal department penned a letter to its U.S. outside counsel on January 28 stating law firms that want to work with Coca-Cola must “commit that at least 30 percent of each of billed associate and partner time will be from diverse attorneys, and of such amounts at least half will be from black attorneys.”
But the “ultimate aspiration” will be at least 50 percent, with at least half that amount from black attorneys.
For new matters, a law firm’s failure to comply with these diversity guidelines after two quarterly reviews will result in a non-refundable 30 percent reduction in fees payable going forward. Continued failure to adhere to the requirements could lead to a termination of the relationship between the firms and the soda company.
Coca-Cola has rolled out new diversity guidelines for outside legal counsel, including requiring law firms to provide 30 percent of billed time from diverse attorneys, of which at least half must be African American.