Apr 8, 2025
If you live in Dallas, chances are you’ve got a complicated relationship with your airline of choice. The loyalty program tug-of-war between American and Southwest is real—and it’s personal. At Unified Law, we’ve racked up our fair share of Rapid Rewards points. On more than a few occasions, I’ve sprinted through Love Field with one shoe untied and still somehow ended up in a middle seat.
But we’ve stayed loyal. Not just because we like free checked bags or because the flight attendant jokes land most of the time. We’ve stayed because of what Southwest used to stand for: a movement, not just a business.
When Rollin King and Herb Kelleher founded Southwest, they weren’t trying to be another airline. They were building something different—a purpose-driven airline for people who couldn’t always afford air travel. They brought in humor. They cut out the junk fees. They democratized the skies. It was a beautiful thing.
But here’s the twist: brands drift.
Over time, baggage fees creep in. Assigned seats start sounding “efficient.” Perks get quietly restricted, and customers are left wondering if the airline still stands for what it once did. It’s not a hostile takeover—it’s slow erosion.
Trust Erodes Quietly
This isn’t about dunking on Southwest. (We would never—especially not from Dallas, where losing favor with Southwest means a lifetime sentence in Row 31 near the bathroom.) Instead, this is a lesson in how purpose gets diluted when it’s not fiercely protected.
Southwest’s story is a warning for every purpose-driven company: If your values aren’t protected by design, they’ll be diluted by default.
That’s why at Unified Law, we’ve ensured that our values aren’t just words on a website or a slide deck from our last retreat. They’re embedded into Unified Law’s legal DNA.
We’ve created what we call a Forever Agreement. At the heart of that agreement?
Our Unified for UN Program.
What Is Unified for UN?
Unified for UN is our commitment to use the economic power of for-profit clients to subsidize critical legal, accounting, and audit services for nonprofits and social enterprises working to advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
But it’s not charity.
It’s structural.
It’s intentional.
And it’s permanent.
That’s right—we literally wrote it into our governing documents.
Our operating agreement mandates that a portion of revenue from our for-profit work goes directly to subsidize the work we do for high-impact organizations. These are nonprofits trying to scale their mission, social enterprises trying to survive in broken markets, and founders who don’t have time to chase a lawyer for help translating legalese into real business advice.
We also want to be clear: Unified for UN is not pro bono work.
This isn’t volunteer time or leftover hours. Our attorneys are paid and get credited the exact same for the work they do for a nonprofit or social enterprise through Unified for UN as they would for our private equity clients.
Why?
Because we’ve learned that when something is free, it’s often treated like it has less value—by both the giver and the receiver.
We believe clients deserve our best thinking, not our spare cycles. Don’t get me wrong. Pro bono work can be great, amazing, worthwhile, and impactful.
But it’s also often human nature that when something’s unpaid, it sometimes gets deprioritized. That’s not how we operate. Our social impact clients deserve the same excellence, urgency, and strategic firepower as our biggest-paying ones—and that’s exactly what they get.
Why Write It Into Our Legal Foundation?
Because we’ve seen what happens when purpose is just a slogan.
When founders leave.
When the board turns over.
When the next round of investors wants to “optimize margin.”
We didn’t want our give-back model to be the first thing on the chopping block. So we built a legal moat around it.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
The Unified for UN Program cannot be eliminated or changed without a 100% vote of both economic and non-economic stakeholders.
We issued a Golden Share with the sole contractual duty to veto any changes to Unified for UN—unless the proposed change is demonstrably better for the world and our communities.
In other words, this is not something we’re “committed to until the next budget review.” It’s locked in. Forever.
Our LAW Framework: It’s Not Just an Acronym. It’s Our DNA.
We don’t need a 3-part mission-vision-values slide. We’ve got one unshakable truth—LAW:
L — Legal Excellence
We bring BigLaw brains without BigLaw bloat. Precision, strategy, and judgment, delivered at speed and scale.
A — Always a Team
We operate like your in-house legal team—collaborative, cross-functional, and in the trenches with you. No silos. No egos. No “who’s billable” politics.
W — Work with and for Purpose
This is where our Unified for UN Program lives. We don’t just support social impact—we’ve hardcoded it into our operating agreement. A portion of every for-profit engagement subsidizes legal, audit, and accounting work for nonprofit and social enterprise clients.
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
— Simon Sinek, Author of Start With Why.
We believe LAW builds trust. Unified for UN ensures that trust lasts—long after the founders leave the room.
Why the UN Sustainable Development Goals?
When we created the Unified for UN Program, we knew we wanted to give back in a way that actually meant something. But we also knew something else: our clients—and our team—span the full political spectrum. We’ve got Texans and Californians, big-city tech founders and rural ranchers, and everything in between.
And honestly, we love that.
So we needed a framework for our impact that wasn’t polarizing. We didn’t want to pick winners or virtue signal. We just wanted to do something good for the world that everyone could get behind.
That’s why we chose the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the foundation for Unified for UN.
The SDGs are 17 global goals adopted by every United Nations member state, including the U.S., with support from both Republican and Democratic administrations. These goals aim to end extreme poverty, improve global health and education, promote gender equality, fight climate change, and ensure peace and prosperity for all.
Let’s be honest:
Who doesn’t want extreme poverty to disappear?
Who doesn’t want their kids to have clean water, healthy food, and safe schools?
Who doesn’t want stable economies and stronger communities?
The United States remains publicly committed to fully implementing the SDGs—both at home and globally. These aren’t partisan talking points. They’re practical, human, and widely supported.
And most importantly for us: they gave our clients a way to tell us what they care about. When a for-profit client works with Unified Law, they can select the SDGs that matter most to them. Then we use part of the revenue from that engagement to subsidize legal, accounting, and audit services for nonprofits and social enterprises working toward those same goals.
So yes—we’re good old-fashioned capitalists. We believe in business, markets, and making money. But we also believe in doing it with a conscience.
The SDGs gave us a simple, universal, nonpartisan way to ensure that our dollars—and yours—do a little more good along the way.
What Kind of Work Does Unified for UN Support?
We don’t just talk about impact—we support it in real, tangible ways.
Through Unified for UN, we’ve helped incredible organizations that are doing everything from saving lives to rethinking education.
A startup focused on enhancing safety by developing innovative medical devices.
A social enterprise focused on youth mental health and suicide prevention.
An education nonprofit building technology education curriculum for our next generation of innovators.
These are not hypothetical feel-good stories. These are real organizations doing high-impact work with limited budgets and lean teams. And because of Unified for UN, they can access legal, tax, and audit services they couldn’t otherwise afford.
We don’t give them handouts and it is NOT pro bono work. We give them professional, business-grade support—the same caliber our for-profit clients get. Because their missions deserve it.
Final Boarding Call
We love Southwest. We’re rooting for them. But we’re also watching—because legacy is fragile, and trust doesn’t survive on nostalgia alone.
At Unified Law, we’ve built our legacy not just on talent, but on commitments we refuse to break. Unified for UN is more than a program—it’s a promise.
That promise comes with weight. There have been months when a deal didn’t close. When a client delayed payment. When not everyone on our team was fully booked. And in those moments, it’s tempting to say, “Maybe we shift the subsidy. Just this month.”
But we don’t.
Unified for UN is a hard cost—non-negotiable, immovable, and baked into our structure. If we need to cut, we cut somewhere else. Because this commitment is part of how we do business, not an optional feel-good extra.
We think that’s the kind of trust clients deserve.
Ready for Takeoff?
If you’re a for-profit company, let’s be honest: nobody loves paying lawyers, accountants, or tax professionals. But if you have to—why not do it in a way that not only gets the job done at a lower price point, but also fuels social impact at the same time? At Unified Law, we deliver high-quality, business-minded legal support—and with every engagement, you’re helping fund nonprofit and social enterprise work that’s actually changing lives.
And if you’re a nonprofit or social enterprise? Why not take a shot and see what Unified Law is all about? You might just find your new legal team. Or tax team. Or accounting team. Who knows—you could get the kind of strategic support that finally helps you scale that idea, close that funding round, or expand your impact.
Because this isn’t about charity. It’s about building something that works—for everyone.
👉 Reach out to us to learn more or get started. It’s about building something that works—for everyone.
Ninety: When Brands Stray – Southwest Airlines and Losing a Founder’s Vision (https://www.ninety.io/founders-framework/blog/when-brands-stray-southwest-airlines-and-losing-a-founders-vision)
UN Sustainable Development Goals – https://sdgs.un.org/goals
