News Article

CYRUS MEHRI as profiled in the Cornell Law Forum

Antonia Saxon

Published: May 20, 2002

Spring 2002 edition "Profiles" section - Page 36

CYRUS MEHRI '88

Cyrus Mehri's devotion to the idea of "justice for all" began around the family dinner table. His parents, Iranian immigrants, were always talking about politics. Kennedy idealism, Vietnam policy, Watergate-anything was fair game. "My parents came to America for two reasons. They wanted freedom. They revered the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And they wanted their children to have a good education. "

His parents' educational aspirations led Mr. Mehri to the Wooster School. "My years there had a formative influence on me," he says. "There probably isn't another prep school that has such a genuine commitment to diversity. Wooster really led the way in that respect. They had already integrated by the 1950s and the idea of diversity was embedded in the culture. "

Following graduation from Wooster, Mr. Mehri attended Hartwick College, a small school in upstate New York, where he bucked the political apathy trend of the early 1980s by forming an environmental action group and busing students to demonstrations in Washington, D.C. A fall term internship had introduced him to Washington's public interest community where, he discovered, a person could really get things done. "We would sit in meetings in Oneonta, New York, with community groups, the meetings would take forever, and nothing would happen. In Washington, people would say, 'We worked hard, we called people, we stayed up all night, and we got this legislation passed. '" After graduation from Hartwick, Mr. Mehri signed on with Public Citizen, one of Ralph Nadar's public interest organizations. "That was a formative experience, too," Mr. Mehri recalls. "I worked as a political organizer for Congress Watch [an organization founded by Mr. Nader]. I went around the country and told people about pieces of legislation, talked to them, urged them to write their Congresspeople. "

Law school was a natural next step. "I came to Cornell and spoke to Dean Lukingbeal, and the two of us hit it off. I could see that she had a genuine commitment to creating public interest opportunities at Cornell. Friends said, 'Cyrus, it will be so conservative! You'll be so bored!' But those warnings proved to be completely false. I found studying law intellectually stimulating from my first day as a law student until my last. And I made some of the best friends I've ever made; you study together, you play touch football together. It's a natural bonding experience. "

Mr. Mehri spent his first year after law school clerking for John T. Nixon, the U.S. District Court judge for the middle district of Tennessee. "Working for a judge of his caliber was a truly wonderful experience. I learned how the judicial system works, and I had the public service satisfaction of working in the federal judicial system. I wish I'd been able to do it for a couple more years. "

After completing the clerkship, Mr. Mehri began looking for a firm that would allow him to try high-profile plaintiff cases. "I called Tony Roisman, who's the former executive director of the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice-he's a legendary guy-and I told him what I was looking for, and he said, 'There's only one firm in D.C. like that: Cohen Milstein. '" Mr. Mehri joined Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld and Toll in 1989, and began tackling powerful corporations in a variety of class-action suits. A case against Bolar Pharmaceutical returned $25 million to defrauded stockholders. Florin v. NationsBank returned $16 million to Simmons Mattress Company's pension investors.

Mr. Mehri's role in Roberts v. Texaco, a race discrimination class action suit, brought him to national prominence. Although gender-based class action suits were still being tried, race-based class action suits had dwindled precipitously during the 1970s and 80s, and Mr. Mehri had to convince Cohen Milstein that the case was winnable. Even without a jury's verdict, Mr. Mehri can claim victory: The Texaco case settled in 1996 for $176 million and Texaco's agreement to accept unprecedented oversight by an outside task force, which was given wide powers to evaluate the company's human resource policies.

Although Mr. Mehri describes himself as "the lightning rod" because of his zealous advocacy, he says, "I don't have any personal animosity toward these companies. I want them to reach their better ideals and aspirations. The companies are better off for going through this, although it's a painful process. "

For his role in the Texaco case, Mr. Mehri was named a finalist for trial lawyer of the year by Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. He also received a telephone call from an African-American woman who worked for Coca-Cola. That phone call led to nine months of research, 150 employee affidavits, and a class action suit on behalf of African-American employees that Coke settled in 2000 for an historic $192.5 million. This time, Mr. Mehri worked on his own.

"I had just left Cohen Milstein. I wanted to be captain of my own ship. I had no billable clients, no cases, and no office. It was all contingency basis. And I settled the case. " Mr. Mehri's paralegals were 15 minutes away from filing class certification papers at the courthouse in Atlanta when Coke agreed to a settlement in principle. Talks continued for months but in the end Coca-Cola agreed to pay the aforementioned damages, as well as to submit its human resource policies to an independent task force similar to the one assigned to Texaco. Last November, Mr. Mehri and his co-counsel filed an employment discrimination case on behalf of the African-American and Hispanic salaried employees of Johnson & Johnson.

Mr. Mehri's firm, Mehri & Skalet, PLLC, is also working on a number of cases that take on "big companies for the little guy": shareholder fraud, auto loan bias, consumer fraud, and corporate abuse. He has also pursued important cases pro bono, like the one that pushed DuPont to hasten the end of chlorofluorocarbon production and established the right of shareholders to debate public interest issues. Mr. Mehri serves on Cornell Law School's Advisory Council and sponsors a speaker's series that brings prominent figures in the public interest arena to speak at the school.

Currently, Mr. Mehri serves on the Settlement Committee in the multidistrict litigation related to the Firestone Tire recall. "In August, 2000, Firestone ran newspaper ads offering $400 to customers who chose to replace Firestone tires with tires from competitors," recalls Mr. Mehri. "The period for the refund was supposed to be from August 9 to August 16. But the ads didn't even appear until August 16-the day the offer was supposed to end. Michael Kanovitz ['94], who is an associate here at the firm, and I filed a motion for a restraining order. The judge issued the restraining order just before midnight. " The next day Firestone announced they would extend the rebate. "This shows what it is possible to do in just one day," says Mr. Mehri. "Just in one day. "