Susan (“Suz”) Mac Cormac co-chairs the Sustainability + Corporate Responsibility and Social Enterprise + Impact Investing practices at Morrison Foerster, where she has practiced since 1996.

Suz is known as a go-to legal resource for social enterprises, impact investors, and mainstream companies developing environmental, social, and corporate governance policies. With deep knowledge in the impact investing model, she understands the nuances of how institutional investors can craft creative solutions and structure both investments and companies to emphasize impact and returns. She co-led the drafting group for the first of the new corporate forms (the Social Purpose Corporation in California, which became the Public Benefit Corporation in Delaware), 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 markets 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.

Suz was a founding board member of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), is a member of the board of directors of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), having served as its primary corporate counsel for 20 years, and is a contributing member of the Coalition of Environmentally Responsible Economies (Ceres) President’s Council, Earth Genome Project, and the UN Environment Program Finance Initiative. She serves as an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she began teaching a new course on climate finance and governance in the fall of 2022 (after nine years of teaching social enterprise). She also serves as an Advisor to the Berkeley Center for Law and Business.

She is also a member of the American Law Institute and an Advisor to the Restatement of Law, Corporate Governance. Suz holds a B.A. from Williams College and received her J.D. and LL.M. degrees from Duke University School of Law.