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Many prominent law firms have recently found themselves in President Donald Trumps crosshairs. Skadden, Arps attorney Rachel Cohen encouraged the firm to fight the governments pressure, only to have her attempts rebuffed and to be effectively forced out from the firm. Cohen shares her fears about how the rule of law is changing in America, raising questions about the legal industrys role in the checks and balances of the U.S. system of government. Cohens experience encourages leaders everywhere to navigate the relationship between their business and broader society. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. These accommodations to the Trump administration, whether from law firms [or institutions like] Columbia University, some people start saying, Oh, they didn’t give up that much. It’s mostly sort of posturing and optics, and why pick a fight if you don’t have to?” Yeah, I think a lot of people think that it’s 2016 and are so convinced of their own intellectual superiority that they are ignoring that the Trump administration is outplaying them. There’s a real problem with people being convinced that we are once again in a situation where you have a disorganized president who is blustery, who doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s a real indictment of judgment to be able to say, “Donald Trump is stupid, so it doesn’t matter. We’re going to just beat him.” I had people say to me in meetings, “Well, this will all work itself out in three years, because people are going to be coming out of the Trump administration trying to get jobs, and nobody will hire them because we’re all mad.” We are fundamentally misaligned on what we think is going to come in the next three years if we fold on this now, because I do not think that there is an end to the Trump administration if we do not hold the line and act collectively. I’ve been asking the CEOs on the show and other CEOs the extent to which business, and I guess law firms as part of that, are part of the checks and balances in the American political system overall. It feels that way to me that it should be, but is there any legal basis for thinking that? I think business, less so. I certainly would argue that there’s a moral obligation when business leaders want to be listened to, and respected, and dismantle guardrails on American capitalism so that they can achieve certain profits, that then there becomes a moral obligation for you to continue to speak on those things even when it’s hard. But I don’t think there’s a legal one, and I think that’s just the nature of capitalism. I do think with law firms it’s different because you swear your oaths. Most of us swear an oath to the Constitution. If you work in this industry, and especially if you’ve made millions and millions of dollars off of it, and your industry is crucial for the functioning of American democracy, and you also swore an oath to the law and the concept of this American experiment broadly, then yes, I think there’s an obligation for you to ensure that the law continues to exist. The decisions to make these accommodations to the Trump administration by Skadden, by Paul Weiss, by other law firms, they’re doing that not necessarily for legal reasons, but for business reasons, right? Because otherwise, it’s going to cost them money. Isn’t it ultimately a business argument to say, “Oh, we want to keep doing that work for the government, or we don’t want to be blacklisted in some way?” I think number one, it’s a bad business decision in the long term, and I’ll come back to that in a second. I’m going to read to you the profits per equity partner at Paul Weiss and Skadden, Arps. This is the average, what the average partner earns in profits on an annual basis. 2023 profits per equity partner at Paul Weiss, $6,574,000. Skadden, Arps: $5,403,000 annually. I just want to make sure that when we’re talking about what profits are being lostand also the people who, again, swore an oath to the Constitution who are working in this industry, who need it to exist, who are clearing $5 million a yearI think that the long-term business strategy of capitulating to someone with authoritarian and oligarchal tendencies. We’ve seen the way that Elon Musk operates and how he turns on people on a dime. Skadden represented Elon Musk in his Twitter acquisition, and that man has no loyalty. Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t have loyalty to each other. To hedge your bets on being in good favor with someone who does not respect people, it’s much less about policy aims of the Trump admin, and that I certainly would not be quitting my job. I didn’t quit when he got elected. That’s a political thing. I don’t expect the firm to speak on political issues, though they have in the past, but I certainly don’t expect that from a business. That’s not what this is. It’s not about politics. It’s about existential infringement on American values, and the existence of a constitutional republic in this country. What’s next for you and what’s your goal? In some ways you’ve become a bit of a pied piper. I know you created a tool kit for lawyers who want to protest internally. What’s your goal in all this? I don’t have a next career move. With the nature of my educational credentials, my financial situation, having worked at Skadden for several years, all of these things, I already felt that I had an obligation to try to prevent the bad thing that I see coming. For some of those folks who are listening to this who may be like, “It’s a little bit too extreme. Is it really that bad?” Maybe there’s some other impact that could be had between here and there about what an alternate view of America’s future looks like? Oh, that’s the path that I’m on. That’s the path that we go down if people collectively act now and intervene. That’s the path that we’re on, is some bad things will happen. We’re already seeing them happen. There’s people with legal status being deported to Salvadorian prisons because of clerical errors, because the’re deporting people over judge’s orders. I think that there’s absolutely a path to not just interrupt these harms, but to channel the kind of response and reaction right now to make a much better version of this country. I think no matter what, things get darker before that happens, but I think at the end of the day, I’m coming on and saying, “These bad things could happen,” but I’m acting in a way where I’m very confident they don’t have to. The fear of retaliation is so strong right now, and where is the bravery going to come from? I guess if you’re already making $5 or $6 million a year and you’re not brave enough to push back, but I don’t know. Jeff Bezos is a billionaire, and he’s not pushing back. Where is that bravery going to come from? It’s going to come from people of color. It’s going to come from people that understand theory, and allyship, and are plugged into their communities and care about them deeply. Hopefully, we also get some people that have a little bit more agency, but if we don’t, that’s all that’s ever worked anyway.
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E-Commerce
Theres one big thing about Rodrigo Corral that does not initially make sense: The book cover maestro does not have a signature style. Consider his chameleonic cover hits. The Fault in Our Stars. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Survivor, Lullaby and the rest of Chuck Palahniuks catalog. Rachel Cusks books. James Freys controversial A Million Little Pieces, the cover that helped launch Corral into ubiquity. Recent collaborative output like Intermezzo and Mojave Ghost. The books don’t have obvious visual connective tissue between thembut somehow, as creative director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and his eponymous studio, Corral has spent the past three decades quietly redefining the look of the modern book again and again. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] A thing that we repeat often in the studio is, ‘Let’s be careful of what we’re good at, because it is the kind of work that you will attract,’ he says. Corral has heeded that caution throughout his career, avoiding pigeonholes and a life of designing the same jacket over and overwhich is notable in a design subset often particularly driven by trends. Consider the Big Book Look of the 60s, or the ubiquitous Book Cover Blob that seemingly seeped onto every jacket a few years ago. If a style has a proven track record, risk-averse publishers or marketing departments are quick to embrace it. Corrals output, which often feels consistently contemporary, is novel for its sheer novelty. Book covers usually follow trends, Frey, one of Corral’s earliest clients, told me in an email exchange. Someone makes a great one and everyone else copies it. If you care about such things, and I do, and try to find who made the original great one, its always Rodrigo. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] GETTING WHAT YOU CAME FOR Corral was born and raised on Long Island, New York, the child of immigrants from Colombia. His parents ran a travel business together, not entirely unlike how he and his partner Anna Corral operate his personal studio today. Books didnt play a huge role in his youth, but when he was around nine or 10, Corrals parents bought him a set of Encyclopedia Britannicaand he savored their object quality. I’d start cracking them open and appreciating the materials, the foil stamping, the faux leather, he says, recalling how the anatomy section featured acetate layering for the nervous system and the muscular system. Those are my closest earliest memories of a book experience. After realizing design and art was a path he wanted to pursue, he applied to the School of Visual Arts, where he found himself studying under industry icons like Chip Kidd and Barbara deWilde. They just always had a smile on their face, he recalls. And their work alone, it just had wit, it had charm, it had layers. And that really for me was like, ‘OKI think I’d like to join the space, or at least try my hand at it.’ After leaving SVA, Corral got a job at Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996, where his first assignment was a paperback edition of Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student’s Guide to Earning a Master’s or a Ph.D. The book already had cover art, and he was disappointed that he didnt get to infuse his own creativity into the project. Then he decided to make the best of it. The all-yellow cover featured a black-ink New Yorker-style illustration of a person hoisting a degree into the air. He made the diploma white to highlight its importance of, well, getting what you came for. It was a tiny victory, but perhaps an important early lesson in how one can infuse their perspective into an at-times rigid paradigm. [Photo: Rodrigo Corral Design Studio] On the whole, Corral loved his early days at FSG, especially because it was an environment where young designers got to sit in on meetings and where the publisher would walk the halls and greet everyone personally. Designers and their work were valued, which helps explain why its a house with a long history of fantastic cover outputfrom Joan Didions Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Lawrence Ratzkin) and Tom Wolfes The Right Stuff (Kiyoshi Kanai) to contemporary jackets like Jonathan Franzens Freedom (Charlotte Strick) and Tove Ditlevsens Copenhagen Trilogy (Na Kim). Farrar, Straus and Giroux has always been a powerhouse literary publishing house that is editorially driven. And what that means from a design standpoint is we’re not reacting to what the markets are asking us, Corral says. It’s strong points of view with brilliant editors and a publisher at the helm [who] are reacting through fiction and nonfiction to what the world is telling us, in many ways. And so that all leads to supporting great design. After five years at the company, Corral says there wasnt much room for upward movement, so he left and did a stint at Grove Atlantic, fllowed by Doubleday. He was laid off in the post-9/11 publishing downsizing, but was given nine months severanceand thats when he started Rodrigo Corral Design Studio. He opened it in the back of a friends production house, A2A Graphics, in Chelsea. And soon after he took on his first project: the cover for A Million Little Pieces. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] REDEFINING THE BESTSELLER But two decades on, you can probably instantly envision itthat outstretched hand, the kaleidoscopic candy dots, that hospital-hued background. Frey had no clue what Corral was going to turn in, but he did have high expectations for the cover to his addiction saga. With a background in art and art history, Frey had been sending Corral paintings of hell by old masters and related imagery. Thankfully, he ignored them all and made his own cover, Frey recalls. When I saw it, I was initially taken aback. Visually, its very arresting, jarring. It felt sharp, dangerous. It also felt lonely, and somehow broken. All of which were a reflection/representation of the text. Frey, who also worked with Corral on his upcoming book Next to Heaven, says he didnt respond for a day. He let his feelings settle. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] And when they did, I was in love. Corral came up with the idea on the way home from his studio. He would often walk past a particular confectionary shop. A package of candy dots in the window always jumped out at him, and as he was pondering Freys book, it clicked. He took his entire fee for the project and hired a photographer, and the two brought the cover to life. Ultimately, Corral says the publisher didnt quite know what to make of it, and found it to be off-puttingbut they said they couldnt stop looking at it. It yielded a visceral reaction. It cemented the tone for the kind of work we wanted to attract, he says. We wanted to do work that was not fitting nicely and neatly into a category and that did not necessarily fit the mold of what a bestseller must look like. Catherine Casalino remembers the early days at Corrals studio. She joined as an intern in 2003, and soon became full time. Rodrigo has made a habit of swinging for the fences, and he encourages anyone who works at his studio to do the same. A big part of that is constantly seeking out fresh inspiration and collaborators, she says. In an age where you can easily marry up a stock image and a font to create an instant cover, or make a living by producing the same style of cover over and over, Rodrigo pushes back against that kind of process. You hire his studio not because you know what youre going to get, but because you know they can deliver something special that you would never have imagined. [Photo: Rodrigo Corral Design Studio] SOLVING THE BOOK While Corral may intentionally lack a signature style, he has a signature approachand it yields work that can feel urgently relevant. When hes designing, Corral starts with what he dubs bad poetryhe reads the manuscript and jots down quick notes in his phone. The ones that still resonate days or a week later are what hell start to focus on pushing forward. From there he concepts and designs. Sometimes hell start a cover and finish it completely. Other times in the studio hell have multiple people working on something. He likens the book design process to cinematography. To explain, he offers the concept of a book that has oranges as a theme. A cinematographer ponders, say, the temperature of the film, the color, whether its set primarily during day or night. I find that parallel with book covers, where it’s typography, it’s scale, it’s composition, it’s lightingand all those things can play into how that same orange can be very different on two different covers, he says. Current Random House vice president, executive art director Greg Mollica joined Corrals studio as a junior designer circa 2002/2003. Hes a deep and close reader; hed read manuscripts all day, bring them home and read them again at night, and come into the studio the next morning with ideas and brilliant singular ways to execute them, Mollica recalls. What struck me first about his studio and process was that the fine art, photography, fashion and culture books outweighed the traditional graphic design books in his personal collection. He was always devouring images and collecting art. Art was everywhere. Rodrigo thought like an artistthats what separated him in the cover design world. In 2011, Corral rejoined FSG as creative director, and today that is officially his full-time job. The decision to return felt strangely predetermined, he says.When I looked at the publishing landscape [publishers and imprints], I kept coming back to FSG as the place where I could contribute and feel valued as a visual artist. He splits his time between New York City and California, and operates his independent studiowhich works across all publishing houses for projects or as a creative director at largeater-hours. At FSG, he says he works with a team of experienced designers in a bit of an autonomous environment. On the studio side, he sees it as more of an agency model that utilizes Anna Corrals background in branding and marketing in chorus with his creative direction. On the whole, How we try to look at projects is we’re not solving to a stylewe’re solving the book itself, he says. Casalino would seemingly agree. I think Rodrigos impact on modern book cover design is that he responds to the unique voices of modern literature in a way that truly reflects where modern literature is going, she says. I remember him saying that he got assigned Chuck Palahniuk initially because the writing was so unique that no one knew quite how to approach it. Instead of making those covers look like prior fiction, he reflected that unique language with a unique visual language. [Photo: Michael Schmelling] BY A SHOW OF HANDS Those who have passed through Corrals studio make up a remarkable roster. Theres Mollica. Casalino. June Park, Elena Giavaldi, Ben Wiseman, Liana Finck, Tyler Comrie, Jason Ramirez, Christopher Brand, Devin Washburn, and on and on. Today, he works with Adriana Tonello, Giacomo Girardi and a couple others. Corral wont take credit for any of their careers or talent. But he does have an impressive track record of hiring wildly talented individuals wherever he oversees designand that, perhaps, is his greatest contribution to publishing at large, beyond any single image. If you hosted a book design event in NYC and you asked the audience by a show of hands who has mentored/worked with Rodrigoover half the audience would raise their hands, Mollica notes. Hes mentored countless designers who are now exceptional art directors. The book cover industry would be completely different without Rodrigos influence. That is not an exaggeration. Hes our Paul Rand. For his part, Corral says hes always looking to surprise himself in his design workand whether at FSG or his own studio, he is always seeking to help his teams surprise themselves, too. I think Rodrigos work has encouraged more designers and publishers to push back against stereotypical cover design and rise to meet the incredible creativity that modern authors are producing, says Casalino. Or, as Corral puts itand likely put it years ago with that cover for A Million Little Pieces: Hopefully we’ve delivered projects that can be genre-busting or genre-breaking, and that can become little victories for the futurefor designers to say, Look, this book was successful with that jacket. Why can’t we as a house take that same leap? What is Rodrigo Corrals style? I don’t know. But if you spot a cover in a store that feels like it was designed and printed just moments before, theres a good chance I could guess who art directed or made it.
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E-Commerce
Its an ordinary morning. Youve woken up from what you thought was a blissfully restful nights sleep. To ensure your body and mind arent playing tricks on you, you check the activity tracker that youve recently strapped on your left wrist. You hope itll turn you into a fitter and healthier version of yourself. But your sleep score says otherwise. It indicates that youve woefully underperformed across all stages of the sleep cycle. It’s also the end of a long month on the job. Youve completed all your deliverables on time, impressed your bosses, and, by all accounts, been a pleasant and reliable colleague. You decide to check your bank account. The balance staring back at you offers a sobering reality check and bleak forecast for the month(s) ahead. Once again, youre compelled to adopt the mantra keep your head down and keep plugging away as your professional credo. Surely, things will eventually get better, right? Why were drawn to numbers Numbers can have that effect on people. They turn feelings of restfulness and satisfaction into dust in the blink of an eye. They can also trick you into believing the complete opposite. Your wearable technology might measure a bad nights sleep more favorably than youd expect. At work, a shockingly mediocre work performance might result in a pay raise or bonus simply because you touted the corporate line. What is undeniable is that humans are magnetically drawn to abstractions of realityboth their own and those of others. Numbers is the true universal language that transcends cultures and geographies. And thats not necessarily a bad thing. After all, quantification helps us measure and organize the world around us. Its how we tell time, keep records, conduct financial transactions and scientific experiments, administer medications, and write computer code. Numbers have even changed the way we communicate. People find percentages and simple frequencies astonishingly persuasivethe more abstract they are, the more they capture attention. Here are two ways I could promote this Fast Company article to a broader audience: I could say, Many people have read and enjoyed this article. This version relies purely on qualitative evidence. I could also say, The click-through rate for this article is 55%, with two-thirds of readers finishing the entire piece. To our 21st-century sensibilities, the latter strangely sounds far more credible and captivating. Fred Hargadon, a former dean of admissions at both Princeton and Stanford, once said: Because we cannot measure the things that have the most meaning, we give the most meaning to the things we can measure. We see this reflected in the cost-cutting efforts of Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), or our obsessive monitoring of global stock market indexes. When numbers dont tell the whole story The real issues arise when we try to apply the same logic used to track a golf handicap to the complexities of the human experience. We assign a numerical representation to someones creditworthiness. In Canada, scores range between 300-900. The higher the score, the more worthy an individual appears in the eyes of a lender. But quantification doesnt stop at the individual level. The Gini coefficient reduces the wicked problem of economic inequality across countries to a single score ranging from 0 to 1. The World Happiness Report uses a 0 to 10 scale to evaluate the quality of life and well-being of entire populations, then assigns them to a global ranking. In 2025, Finland was ranked the happiest country for the eighth year in a row. Does this ranking mean there arent any unhappy Fins? Far from it. When numbers ignore humanity Matters become even more complicated when we pressure organizations that prioritize people and the planet over profits to justify their existence and demonstrate their impact through dataeven though we can’t (and frankly, shouldn’t measure their contributions, at least not in the short term. Global climate action is a prime example. If we judge the efforts of an entire industry devoted to combatting the climate crisis solely by meeting ambitious targetslike achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050we risk overlooking the true stories of progress, resilience, and adaptation that occur along the way. Relying on numbers can also be downright sinister in instances where it has a dehumanizing effect. Assigning prison inmates numbers instead of using their names, or publishing casualty statistics during a war, reduces individuals to mere figures, which strips away their humanity. People are not numbers, and life isnt always a data set that we need to optimize or manipulate. Sometimes, we need to hear the full story. Otherwise, we risk reducing human existence to mere abstractions and approximations of reality. The added benefit? Several studies have shown that people can retain qualitative information much longer than quantitative information. While numbers and statistics can have an immediate effect, like ruining a perfectly good night’s sleep, a well-crafted story or anecdote leaves a lasting impression.
Category:
E-Commerce
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