Eric Holder at the National Action Network breakfast/IMAGE: C-SPAN via YouTube
Last week NLPC documented how Eric Holder — Barack Obama‘s first Attorney General — built a lucrative racial equity audit practice at Covington & Burling, billing corporations nearly $2,300 an hour to certify their racial justice compliance while simultaneously chairing the Democratic Party’s redistricting operation. What we did not mention is that Holder was not the only Obama attorney general who went into the business.
Loretta Lynch served as Obama’s second attorney general from 2015 to 2017. Upon returning to private practice, she joined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison — one of New York’s most prominent white-shoe law firms. There, she chairs the firm’s Civil Rights and Racial Equity Audits practice, which Paul Weiss describes as among the nation’s first dedicated legal teams focused on conducting racial equity and civil rights audits. Her flagship engagement: leading Amazon’s racial equity audit of its nearly one million U.S. hourly employees, announced in April 2022 following shareholder pressure. Paul Weiss also conducted a racial equity audit for Chevron, published in March 2023.
Two successive Obama attorneys general. Two competing BigLaw firms. One industry.
They were not alone. A third major player rounded out the market: WilmerHale, the Washington and Boston-based firm whose racial equity audit client roster includes Google, Home Depot, Goldman Sachs, and Mondelēz International, among others. At Google, the audit was led by Debo Adegbile — a civil rights attorney whom Obama had nominated to lead the Justice Department‘s Civil Rights Division, only to see the Senate reject the nomination in a bipartisan 47-52 vote in 2014. Adegbile joined WilmerHale after the failed nomination and eventually chaired its Anti-Discrimination Practice. At McDonald’s, the engagement arrived after a 55.1% shareholder vote in May 2022 pushed by SOC Investment Group — the same Democratic-aligned union investment fund whose pressure campaign was described in last week’s NLPC report. WilmerHale’s review took over two years to complete, publishing its final report in August 2024.
There is one more piece of this history that deserves attention: none of these firms actually invented the instrument they were selling. The corporate civil rights audit was pioneered in 2016 by Laura Murphy, an independent civil rights consultant and former ACLU Washington legislative director, who conducted the first-ever corporate civil rights audit for Airbnb. In 2018, Facebook commissioned Murphy for what became a two-year engagement, which she conducted alongside civil rights law firm Relman Colfax, culminating in a July 2020 final report. By the time the post-Floyd wave of audit demand hit in 2021, BigLaw had moved in to commercialize at scale what Murphy had constructed as a civil rights accountability tool.
What Murphy’s original vision and the BigLaw commercialization shared was a common political sensibility. The approved auditor ecosystem, from its origins through its peak years of 2021 to 2024, drew exclusively from law firms and practitioners aligned with Democratic causes and administrations. No firm with a meaningfully different political profile was acceptable to the activist shareholders driving the demand. As NLPC reported last week, when JPMorgan Chase attempted to satisfy that demand by using PricewaterhouseCoopers — a financial firm rather than a civil rights law firm — SOC Investment Group publicly condemned the result as a “basic misunderstanding of what a racial equity audit is and should be.”
The donation data for these firms makes the pattern explicit. Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame, has compiled the most comprehensive publicly available analysis of political giving among the top 150 AmLaw firms. His 2025 findings covering the 2023–2024 cycle: Paul Weiss employees sent $3,870,998 to Democratic-affiliated outlets and $132,495 to Republican-affiliated outlets — 96.7% Democratic, and the single largest Democratic donor in raw dollars among all 150 firms studied. His 2021 findings documented WilmerHale employees at 93.2% Democratic in the 2017–2020 cycle, with the pattern consistent into recent years. These were the firms corporate America paid to deliver independent assessments of their racial justice practices.
The companies that paid into this ecosystem — Amazon, Chevron, Google, Home Depot, McDonald’s — presented these engagements to their shareholders as independent, expert reviews of their civil rights practices. What they purchased, collectively, was access to a network of former Democratic administration officials at firms whose employees donate to Democratic causes at rates of 93 to 97 percent, certified by union investment groups whose political affiliations run in exactly the same direction.
The word “independent” appears in every one of these audit reports. Shareholders deserved a better definition.
Next week: The corporate donors who funded this ecosystem — and the parallel payments to activist organizations that make the full picture visible.
