Susan H. Mac Cormac

Mac Cormac, co-chair of Morrison & Foerster's business department and its clean-tech practice group, is a key player in the push to help socially responsible and environmentally minded businesses thrive.

She is a close adviser to cutting-edge companies and the investment firms that fund them and is also helping transform the legal underpinnings of corporate America.

"I fundamentally believe that our natural resources have been mispriced and it's going to have an effect on all of us, including business," Mac Cormac said.

One way she has tried to get at that problem is to change the basic rules that corporations play by. She had a major role in the drafting and signing into law of a state bill late last year that creates a new model for how companies can incorporate.

These "flexible purpose corporations" can pursue a social or environmental goal alongside the traditional focus solely on maximizing shareholder value. The traditional model's legal constraints are a big reason why more companies don't act in an environmentally responsible way, Mac Cormac said.

Already, 20 companies have chosen to become flexible purpose corporations, she said.

Mac Cormac also has been behind financing deals - she recently represented Driptech Inc, a company that sells affordable drip irrigations systems to farmers in the developing world, in its early-stage financing. She also represented venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in a complex recapitalization and restructuring of the solar company Amonix Inc.

Mac Cormac, herself a mother of three young children, advised Revolution Foods in its latest financing to expand its business of improving the quality of school lunches.

She also is busy serving on the board of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a nonprofit organization that is creating standards for companies to integrate social responsibility and environmental performance reporting with standard financial corporate disclosures.

Such standards will shift corporate behavior, Mac Cormac said. "That's a big game changer."

- FIONA SMITH