The Coca-Cola Co. made the legal news recently by issuing new rules for outside counsel: 30% of new work billed must be from minority or women attorneys, and half of those should be Black attorneys. Failure to meet those goals can result in outside firms suffering a price reduction for their services or losing the company’s business altogether.

In 1971, the same year Coca-Cola released its iconic commercial depicting multihued men and women singing about buying the world a Coke, a young lawyer from North Carolina named Tom Sampson moved to town and teamed up with John L. Kennedy to form what is considered to be Georgia’s oldest minority law firm, Thomas Kennedy Sampson & Tompkins.