Susan H. Mac Cormac

Mac Cormac, a partner in Morrison & Foerster LLP’s corporate department in San Francisco, is chair of the firm’s social enterprise and impact investing group and chair of the energy and clean technology groups.

She’s passionate about linking her urgent concern for the environment to her deep knowledge of corporate transaction work—but it isn’t always easy. In early April, she was in Nashville, Tennessee, for a conference where the general counsel of venture capital groups met.

“I raised impact investing and climate change,” she said. “There weren’t many takers.” Still, she remains optimistic. “They’ll join the party,” she said.

“Some of our biggest clients, like SoftBank, are starting to look at climate risk and climate change.”

Next, Mac Cormac spoke in San Francisco at a California Public Utility Commission public forum on Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s corporate governance and safety culture. There, panelists considered the big utility’s future in light of its role in the state’s catastrophic wildfires. Those events and the rise of other climate-related disasters can serve to alert the public to the planetary impacts of rising greenhouse gas levels, she said.

“If the flooding and the fires don’t do it, what will?,” she said. “I’m honored and excited to participate in these events.”

Meanwhile, there’s her client work. In recent months Mac Cormac advised The Nature Conservancy on developing sophisticated financial instruments for co-investment and aggregation of funds to support sustainable timber and water programs. One is The Sustainable Water Impact Fund GP LLC, designed to restructure and improve water and agriculture assets while benefiting land and water conservation.

Beyond climate and environmental work, she has advised on some of the highest-profile late stage investments in recent years, including SoftBank Group Corp.’s two largest private tender offers in history: its $7.7 billion investment in Uber Technologies Inc. in 2017 and its more recent $10.4 billion investment in WeWork Co.

Still, investors are starting to notice the connections between the climate’s shift, the resulting loss of land and how that leads to civil unrest, Mac Cormac said.

“Some of what some investors do is window dressing or greenwashing, but much of it is real,” she said. “The rise of activist investors and hedge funds—that’s accelerating. So is the amount of capital going into climate related solutions. It’s partly a result of Trump. With the government moving backwards on these issues, private capital is stepping up.”

Mac Cormac called the political effort known as the Green New Deal “completely unrealistic,” but she sees an upside. “I like the focus on a greater scale.” The bottom line: “I’m encouraged. I have three boys, and I want a world for them.”

—John Roemer