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Meet the Lawyer Working on Inclusion Rider Language

By Cogan Schneier
April 01, 2018

At the Oscars in March, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand made “inclusion rider” go viral. But Kalpana Kotagal, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll had already worked for months to write the language for such provisions. Kotagal was developing legal language for contract provisions that Hollywood's elite could use to require studios and other partners to employ diverse workers on set.

Civil rights and employment litigator Kotagal and her colleagues from the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative — renamed the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative — at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism had been discussing inclusion riders with Hollywood agents and lawyers. “What we hope is that this kind of change, driven by those with power in the industry, will help to make this the normative practice industry wide,” Kotagal says.

The initiative, which was founded and directed by Professor Stacy Smith, is now including the music industry in its groundbreaking research on diversity and inclusion.

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