The Next Big (Legal) Thing?

Back when Seligman was a teenager, becoming a lawyer seemed improbable, although his father had been a lawyer early in his career and worked on the Nuremberg trials as a junior prosecutor. "In many ways, I was raised to be a lawyer," says Seligman. "But I was very skeptical about the career path laid out for me."

He dropped in and out of college, preferring to enjoy the hippie life, play guitar, and attend protests. "I've always had a commitment to social change," says Seligman, whose Berkeley office features a 1960s student-protest poster near his desk. "In my youth, I thought it could happen through demonstrations. I still believe they can be useful. But you need more than that."

He learned to use the law -- class-action litigation, specifically -- as a tool for social change. His biggest victory was a discrimination suit in the early 1990s against Lucky Stores, a chain of supermarkets that has since been acquired by Albertson's. At the time, the $107 million settlement was the third-largest ever reached in a sex-discrimination class action. More important, as part of the settlement, the company had to stop pigeonholing women into low-paying jobs and start providing them with more opportunities to advance. Five years later, Seligman says, Lucky had doubled the percentage of women in store management. Says Steve Stemerman, an attorney at San Francisco firm Davis, Cowell & Bowe, who is on the Wal-Mart team: "Unlike a certain segment of plaintiffs' attorneys who are out to take the money and run, Brad is more interested in making change. With Lucky, he created a basic fairness that benefited not just the people represented in the class action but the entire workforce."

Seligman did, as it turns out, take his cut of the $12 million attorney's fees from the Lucky settlement and run, but he did so to start the Impact Fund. "It was embarrassing for an old revolutionary to have that much money," he admits.

For the time being, Seligman remains focused on Wal-Mart. Demonstrating that discrimination permeates the chain is a considerable challenge. But given what he says he has learned about Wal-Mart so far, Seligman is feeling confident. "Wal-Mart is a uniquely centralized company," he says. "It has a command-and-control system, which is important in class-action law. You need to show uniformity and common treatment of people, that what happens in Florida is similar to what happens in Oregon."

Another key is being ready to go to trial. It sounds obvious, but some lawyers assume that a company will cave from bad publicity. The majority do settle. But Wal-Mart has a reputation for aggressively fighting cases. Seligman says that suits him fine. "I imagine there will be settlement discussions," he says, "but Wal-Mart will know that we are prepared to go to trial. We are determined to take them someplace they don't want to go."

Chuck Salter is a Fast Company senior writer based in Baltimore. Contact Brad Seligman by email (bseligman@impactfund.org).