A Reformer Who Means Business

Mehri acknowledges the transformation. He goes from being a company's worst nightmare prior to the settlement to being a supporter afterward. The change is genuine. He wants any and all reforms to be effective so that class-action members at the company will benefit and so that the company serves as a role model for others. "Up until then, I've been talking about everything they do wrong," he says. "I want to laud them for what they're doing right." When he and James Poppell sat down at the negotiating table last year, the two attorneys couldn't have disagreed more. Mehri was part of a class-action suit against Visteon Corp. alleging discrimination involving African-American employees at its Nashville auto-glass plant. But Poppell, Visteon's outside counsel, argued that his statistical expert had invalidated the claim. The two sides finally agreed to work something out to avoid a trial. Negotiations were contentious but constructive. The plant was losing money, and both parties wanted business to improve.

"You meet a lot of lawyers who want to win whether their case is right or wrong, but I didn't perceive that to be true of Cyrus," says Poppell. "We were able to open a discussion that resulted in a settlement that was good for everybody. After hotly debating the issue, I'd say we ended up friends. That's unusual."

So was the settlement. The federal judge in the case called it "fascinating." Visteon agreed to a semiannual report card detailing salaries, raises, and rates of promotion for African-Americans and other minorities at the plant. "Every time I settle a case, I try to do something new," Mehri says.

A diversity report card is the sort of corporate disclosure that Mehri believes could ultimately reduce discrimination litigation. If public companies were required to produce a detailed breakdown of compensation by race and gender as part of their annual report, discrepancies would be apparent to everyone. Shareholders, Mehri says, understand that glass ceilings and glass walls are bad for business, because they prevent a company from getting the most out of its employees.

"Transparency acts like a Pentium chip to bring about change," he says. "It's better than litigation. It would revolutionize corporate America. Once you go from secrecy to disclosure, you can change a company overnight."

Sidebar: Cyrus Mehri's hurry-up offense

Cyrus Mehri looks for cases with "a public dimension." Sometimes that means going after giant companies. He also goes after small but high-profile institutions -- such as the National Football League. "We reached tens of millions of people with our NFL project," he says.

A longtime football fan, Mehri had watched the league wrestle with the issue of minority head coaches for years. Last year, he and Johnnie Cochran, his cocounsel on the BellSouth case, commissioned a report by economist Janice Madden from the University of Pennsylvania. Her findings: About 70% of the league's players are black, compared with 28% of the coordinators and 6% of the head coaches. Despite having records that were as good as or better than their white counterparts, black head coaches were usually the first to be fired and the last to be hired. It was a glass ceiling, moved to the gridiron.

The report became instant news, and the NFL got a taste of what companies such as Texaco and Coca-Cola had experienced when Mehri showed up on their doorstep. "He's probably the best lawyer in the country at dealing with the media," says Byron Perkins, a Birmingham lawyer and occasional Mehri cocounsel.

By November, the NFL had formed the Committee on Workplace Diversity. A few weeks later, the Baltimore Ravens announced that Ozzie Newsome, already the NFL's highest ranking African-American, had been given the title of general manager, a league first. In late December, the diversity committee announced that the owners had agreed to interview at least one minority candidate for every head-coach opening. While monitoring the annual off-season coaching shuffle, during which defensive whiz Marvin Lewis became the Cincinnati Bengals' first African-American head coach, Mehri continues with his usual legwork, talking with former players, coaches, and executives.

"We didn't know what to expect when we initiated our report," says Mehri. "But we have established ourselves as a presence in the league. We're on the playing field, and we will be for some time to come."

Chuck Salter is a Fast Company senior writer based in Baltimore. Contact Cyrus Mehri by email (info@findjustice.com).