Feet on the Ground
Teri Plummer McClure ensures that UPS runs smoothly
BY JERRY GRILLO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY STAN KAADY
TERI PLUMMER MCCLURE’S LOVE FOR
the law might be in her DNA.
“My grandfather was a lawyer, but he
didn’t go to law school. He sat for the bar
the old-fashioned way [reading for the
bar, apprenticing under an attorney and
then taking the bar exam] and was a great
advocate for the people in his community,”
says McClure, general counsel, corporate
secretary and senior vice president of
legal, compliance, audit and public affairs
for UPS Inc., the Fortune 500 package
delivery company based in Sandy Springs,
a suburb north of Atlanta.
“Coming up as an African-American in
Kansas, there wasn’t really an opportunity
for my grandfather to make a living
practicing law,” she says. “But when he
retired from the post office after more than
30 years, he hung out his shingle.”
Louis Plummer Sr. practiced law for
many years, including 10 years as a
solo practitioner, working a lot of court-appointed cases and making a lasting
impression on his granddaughter, who
spent many evenings with him debating
sports, politics, entertainment, local
affairs—“pretty much every issue under
the sun,” says McClure. “We could debate
anything in my family.”
The little girl who once thought it
would be cool to be an oceanographer (“I
was big into Flipper,” she says) is today
one of the top executives—a member of
the 10-person management committee—
for a $53 billion company that delivers
more than 15. 8 million packages to
more than 8. 8 million customers each
day in 220 countries and territories. She
recently returned from a trip to one of
those countries, the Netherlands, as
UPS is in the process of negotiating its
acquisition of Dutch shipping company
TNT Express. If that $6.8 billion deal
closes in the third quarter as expected,
it will be the largest acquisition in UPS’s
105-year history.
SUPER LAWYERS / BUSINESS EDITION 2012
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