Susan Mac Cormac, guest innovator at the Food Business School at Culinary Institute of America.

Susan Mac Cormac

Partner, Morrison Foerster; Co-chair, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), Social Enterprise + Impact Investing, and Energy practices

Susan (“Suz”) co-chairs the firm’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), Social Enterprise + Impact Investing, and Energy practices. Her practice focuses on late-stage financings, secondaries, and other corporate transactions for investors, such as SoftBank and Temasek, and on investments for some of the top investors dedicated to impact, from “impact first” foundations, to family offices, to private equity funds. She co-led the drafting group for the first of the new corporate forms (the Social Purpose Corporation in California), has created hybrid/tandem corporate structures and crafted debt and equity instruments that blend impact with traditional financial terms, and has used corporate law to develop creative capital market solutions to pressing environmental problems. She also advises the boards of public and private companies on corporate governance and fiduciary duties as applied to sustainability and climate change. She was named a California Lawyer Attorney of the Year (CLAY) in 2012 and 2016 by Daily Journal and the Most Innovative Lawyer in North America in 2015 by the Financial Times.

She was a founding board member of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, and a current board member of Business for Social Responsibility. Suz has also served as an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Law since 2006, where she has taught on Social Enterprise Law and most recently on Climate Finance and Governance.