A Reformer Who Means Business

Employment-discrimination lawsuits are an inherently uphill battle. In 2001, Mehri and Cochran commissioned an in-depth report by two professors at Cornell Law School, Mehri's alma mater, designed to examine how plaintiffs and defendants in employment-discrimination cases fare when the cases go to appeal. According to the findings in the report, when a defendant appeals, the trial decision is overturned 45% of the time. However, when a plaintiff appeals, the reversal rate is just 5%.

Class action suits only steepen the incline. The idea is to be efficient: Instead of conducting more or less the same trial repeatedly, the court allows a group of individuals to consolidate their claims as a single class (Texaco had 1,400 class members; Coke had 2,200). But most race-related employment- discrimination cases fail to win class certification because of the difficulty in proving that complaints from various employees -- in different locations, from different departments, and with different supervisors -- represent a systemic problem rather than a series of individual problems.

Some observers say that Mehri has overcome the odds with a little luck and an abundance of media savvy. Take the infamous Texaco tapes, in which managers at the company were heard disparaging black employees and agreeing to destroy potential evidence. It wasn't until a former Texaco employee contacted Mehri about the existence of the tapes and stories about them appeared on the front page of the New York Times that Texaco agreed to settle. Bari-Ellen Roberts, one of the plaintiffs in the case, says that her attorneys tipped off the newspaper (a transcript of the tapes had been filed with the court), and Mehri, while not acknowledging this, doesn't deny it either.

He insists that he succeeds through diligence. A recent discovery hearing is a good case in point. He was, as is his custom, asking for the moon: the company's HR database. Discrimination suits often boil down to math. Does a statistical analysis of pay scales, raises, and promotions reveal a significant disparity for certain groups? Of course, you can't do the math without the numbers. So there was Mehri, on the opposition's home turf, as he puts it, in the state where this corporation was based and in many respects beloved, and in the courtroom where the opposing counsel had once clerked.

When the judge asked about the status of the database, neither the defense counsel nor the two-dozen lawyers who were accompanying him said that they were familiar with it. So Mehri described the database in detail. The week leading up to the hearing, Mehri had been up late into the night interviewing class members about it. Once again, the legwork paid off: The judge ruled that the defendant had to produce the database.

A NATURAL ACTIVIST

Mehri was born to be an advocate. He grew up hearing the story of his parents fleeing their native Iran. His mother had been sent home from college for criticizing the government. It was during a conversation with her roommate, but it was enough to cause trouble. Denied her education, she accompanied Mehri's father to New York, where he became an ophthalmologist, and she became an artist.

Politics and protest were important issues in the Mehri household. When Mehri was 8, he and his father went to Washington, DC to attend the biggest peace march of the Vietnam era. His parents would have neighbors, colleagues, and friends over to the house to debate world events. That's where he faced a judge (a friend of his parents) for the first time. Even then, Mehri wasn't shy about speaking his mind or about sharing his interest in politics. The first hearings he witnessed, in the summer of 1974, were unforgettable. "I remember my friends saying, 'Let's go out and play,' and I'd say, 'No, I want to watch Watergate.' "

He was a natural activist, passionate and informed. At Hartwick College in upstate New York, he organized student bus rides to attend protests over U.S. policy in Central America. After graduating magna cum laude, he moved to Washington to work for Public Citizen. As a "Nader Raider," Mehri would barnstorm on an issue that was before Congress, swooping into towns in Tennessee, Texas, and Washington State. He would mobilize local organizers, plead his case to the newspaper editorial board, and offer up a concise, compelling argument for the TV cameras -- an early blueprint for his class-action work. He was the group's youngest field organizer at the time, recalls Craig McDonald, and also one of the best.

But there's more to Mehri than indignation. One of the main reasons that he reaches such extraordinary settlements, says Adele Kimmel of Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, is his sense of diplomacy. (Kimmel's group supports civil-rights litigation and monitors class-action settlements.) Mehri is an advocate with whom business can do business. "Some attorneys are so tenacious that they can't praise a company in any way," Kimmel says. "They will beat a company into the ground. Cyrus is smart. He understands that it's important to allow a company to save face."