Aon’s Global Pro Bono Initiative, launched in 2014, is part of the firm’s commitment to making an impact around the world using the skills and experience of its people. As part of this initiative, in 2021, nine colleagues from Aon’s Law and Compliance team assisted with the Jim Crow Juries Project – a project dedicated to rectifying a set of criminal justice rules created by earlier jury practices in Louisiana formed during slavery. This week’s host, Aon’s Head of Colleague Experience, North America, Andrea O’Leary welcomes Aon’s Global Law and Compliance Leader, Reinsurance Solutions, Peter Banick, for a conversation highlighting the Jim Crow Juries Project’s history as well as other Aon pro bono efforts and accomplishments.
Aon’s Global Pro Bono Initiative, launched in 2014, is part of the firm’s commitment to making an impact around the world using the skills and experience of its people. As part of this initiative, in 2021, nine colleagues from Aon’s Law and Compliance team assisted with the Jim Crow Juries Project – a project dedicated to rectifying a set of criminal justice rules created by earlier jury practices in Louisiana formed during slavery.
This week’s host, Aon’s Head of Colleague Experience, North America, Andrea O’Leary welcomes Aon’s Global Law and Compliance Leader, Reinsurance Solutions, Peter Banick, for a conversation highlighting the Jim Crow Juries Project’s history as well as other Aon pro bono efforts and accomplishments.
Additional Resources:
2021 U.S. Insurance Awards: Aon, Community Outreach Project of the Year (Pro Bono and Volunteer)
Aon’s chief innovation officer wants to tackle ‘complex’ challenges with tech
Jim Crow Juries: The Promise of Justice Initiative
Tweetables:
“This isn’t about us individually as lawyers, it’s about what we can do as a department to support this effort.” — Peter Banick
“This program has been a truly united and global effort at Aon.” — Peter Banick
“We aim to provide the best value we can to those who need it most….and the best way we can do that is in an Aon United manner.” — Peter Banick
Voiceover:
Welcome to “On Aon,” a podcast featuring conversations between colleagues on, well, Aon. This week, we hear from Peter Banick around Aon’s pro bono work. And now, this week’s host, Andrea O’Leary.
Andrea O’Leary:
Welcome to the next episode of the On Aon Podcast series. My name is Andrea O'Leary and I have been a colleague at Aon for nine years. I recently stepped into a new role leading the colleague experience for North America. And I also lead our culture work for delivering Aon United. With me today is global law and compliance leader for reinsurance solutions, Peter Banick, who's been at Aon for nearly 11 years. I'm so excited to have Peter here today, who also leads our law and compliance team's Global Pro Bono and Corporate Social Responsibility committee. Which has done amazing work giving back to the communities that we all live and do business in.
Andrea O’Leary:
Thank you so much for being here today, Peter. Before we get started, I'd like to ask you just a quick warmup question to get to know you a little bit better. Can you please tell us about how you became involved in pro bono work at Aon?
Peter Banick:
Yeah. And thanks Andrea, I'm glad to be here with you. To answer the question, for me personally, volunteerism has always been a part of my life growing up. My dad was a police officer, my mom was a teacher, so they really instilled in me the importance of public service. So, I'd always been doing different forms of volunteer work. When I came to Aon after law school, I was really doing volunteer work on an individualized basis. So, I was working with local nonprofit legal services organization, supporting local small businesses, things like that.
Peter Banick:
And then I started really talking to folks around the Aon law department and realized pretty quickly that a lot of colleagues are really doing some incredible pro bono work around the world. So, I really got interested in how do we do that? And how do we scale that as a department, so that we can ensure the law department is really walking the walk when it comes to prioritizing our colleagues and serving our communities.
Andrea O’Leary:
That's awesome. Thanks so much for sharing a little bit about kind of who you are and how you got so interested in the work even before Aon. So, let's jump right in. With so many worthwhile causes to consider, how does your team prioritize what causes Aon supports?
Peter Banick:
Yeah, admittedly, it's very difficult to choose. There are a ton of really great organizations out there and great projects to get involved in. But when I really distill the purpose of our pro bono committee, I have two main objectives in mind. One is to increase colleague engagement, and two is to increase our social impact in the world. So, we really let those objectives drive our decision making when we prioritize which causes we want to support, really a balancing of two things. One, where is the greatest need and where can we have the greatest impact? And two, which causes, or organizations, or issues are most compelling to our colleagues?
Andrea O’Leary:
Yeah. I love the tie back because I know at Aon, so much of what we do, both the work that we do professionally as Aon, as we run our business, but also personally all comes back to impact. And the impact that we have on the world and the communities we live in, and just really trying to make that impact great.
Andrea O’Leary:
And so, the fact that the work that you guys do to prioritize this amazing pro bono work also comes down to that impact aspect, I think is really, really critical as we continue to think about the way that we engage our colleagues and the footprint we leave on the world. So, I love that.
Andrea O’Leary:
So, in 2021, the law team was awarded the U.S. Insurance Award's Community Outreach Project of the Year. And that was by the Business Insurance. And specifically, it was rewarded for the work on the Jim Crow Juries Project. Can you please provide us some history on that project, and provide us maybe details about Aon's involvement?
Peter Banick:
Yeah, absolutely. I'll start with some historical context, and then we'll come back around to the project itself. The most important thing to know about the Jim Crow Juries Project and the reason it was so compelling to work on for myself and my colleagues, was that it was seeking to remedy, if only partially, a set of criminal justice rules that are directly from Louisiana's history of slavery.
Peter Banick:
So, following the end of slavery, formally at least, there was a system known as convict leasing, where private enterprises, primarily wealthy white landowners could essentially rent labor from prisoners who were predominantly black at the time and continue to be.
Peter Banick:
So, it is a very profitable business model to get cheap labor when slavery was no longer permitted. So they sought to institute rules that would push more and more prisoners who were predominantly black into the prison system to benefit the wealthy white population. And so, in that context, in 1898, Louisiana held a Constitutional Convention. And the explicitly stated purpose of that convention was to establish the supremacy of the white race in this state.
Peter Banick:
And in order to do so, they adopted a wide variety of policies that would be embedded in their state constitution with the purpose very clearly to disenfranchise the African American community, and strip them of rights that we consider fundamental to being a citizen of the United States. And for example, I'll just give you an example of some of the things from the policy changes they made during that Constitutional Convention.
Peter Banick:
One was, significant restrictions on voter rights, which had just staggering reductions in the number of black voters. There were 130,000 registered voters in Louisiana in 1898, and just 600 black voters, 24 years later in 1922. Obviously, a dramatic decline. There was also new and very harsh criminal sentencing guidelines and strict no release policies, which again, was a way to push prisoners into that convict leasing program for the benefit of white landowners.
Peter Banick:
And third, and we'll focus a little bit more on today, was the increased ability to convict criminal defendants with a vote of just 9 of 12 jurors. Since a majority of jurors were white, the policy had the double edge effect of both silencing black jurors, and significantly increasing the probability and convicting, and imprisoning African American defendants.
Peter Banick:
So it's that third point, the so-called split-jury or non-unanimous jury or Jim Crow Jury that gave rise to the current project.
Peter Banick:
So, as we go on to sort of the historical context, Louisiana goes on to become the incarceration capital of the world. There were almost 40% of felony trials were decided by non-unanimous juries, which was very obvious in its effects. They were disproportionate to the black community. And sadly, that was the intended effect of the 1898 convention.
Peter Banick:
So somewhat unbelievably, the split jury rule remained on the books in Louisiana until 2018, when Louisiana citizens voted to repeal the law 120 years after it was first instituted. In the meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the split jury rule several times in the 1970s, the court ruled that non unanimous juries were unconstitutional, but only for federal criminal trials, they left states the flexibility to continue to use them.
Peter Banick:
And it wasn't until 2020 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that non-unanimous juries were unconstitutional at the state level as well. However, that 2020 decision didn't immediately remedy the harm. This was in large part because the U.S. Supreme Court declined to apply its decision retroactively. And when Louisiana repealed the split jury rule from its constitution, it applied only on a prospective basis.
Peter Banick:
So, anyone convicted by a non-unanimous jury before January 1, 2019, still had to serve their entire prison sentence, even though the criminal procedural rule was struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court and repealed by the citizens of Louisiana. So that's really where the Jim Crow Juries Project comes in.
Andrea O’Leary:
Yeah. I first off just want to say, wow, if we think about just the history and the context of what has really been, like you said, over 120 years. Really now at this point, where we're at 150 years since the rule originally was overturned in the '70s, this is a perfect example of what we talk about oftentimes when we talk about the systemic issues, and the systemic policies and laws in place that were intended many times hundreds of years ago to intentionally cause inequity.
Andrea O’Leary:
And although times have changed, oftentimes the rules, and the policies, and the laws are very slow to change. And then what happens is we create, and we perpetuate further inequity. And this project that Aon has jumped into is a perfect example of how that can happen in a particular state, or in Louisiana, in something that at the time, hundreds of years ago felt like a very normal thing to do and felt very consistent.
Andrea O’Leary:
We now look back, and we think, why did it take so long for these laws to get amended and to get changed? And you're right. It is unfortunate to hear that right now, it's only in a place where it's looking sort of future focused, where any future convictions, and it's not looking retroactively. So, there's a lot of people I can only imagine, who are sitting in jail, serving long sentences because of something that now has been ruled unconstitutional.
Andrea O’Leary:
And so again, the perpetuation of inequity continues to exist in these instances. And so, I just would say, thank you for sharing a lot of that history with myself, but as well as with our audience. Because when people are unsure what we mean when we say there's systemic perpetuation, this is a perfect example of that.
Peter Banick:
Yeah. You're spot on, Andrea.
Andrea O’Leary:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, you started to allude to the project, so I want to get into that. So, let's discuss that a little bit more, and tell us about the project itself and what Aon's role is in it.
Peter Banick:
Yeah, absolutely. The Promise of Justice Initiative is a nonprofit based in Louisiana, and they're really the leaders of the project locally. They identified over 1,500 individuals that fell into that category you were just describing. Where individuals were convicted by non-unanimous juries, but they're required to serve their entire sentence because there was no retroactive effect of the change in laws.
Peter Banick:
So PJI as we call them, went out and they got as many law firms and corporate legal teams as possible to represent these individuals. And once we heard about this project, I'd sort of alluded to this earlier. We really had no choice. This is something we had to get involved in. So, we built a team of nine Aon law colleagues and engaged one of our external law firm partners and took on six pro bono clients, which was three more cases than the law firm expected to take on at the time.
Peter Banick:
So we are just a small part of a much, much bigger project, but for those six clients, it means everything. Just to be represented, just to be heard, just to know that someone's advocating for them. That justice will be had at the end of the day, gives them some hope, gives their family some hope that there will be a future for them.
Peter Banick:
And that we're actually and actively doing something to fight against that structural racism. And so that's really the overall effort, this isn't just an Aon project. It's really a large and concerted effort to remedy past discrimination and continue to fight against that structural racism that you're talking about.
Andrea O’Leary:
Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because knowing what I know about the Aon law team, many of them, most of them do not specialize in criminal legal activity and litigation, and what that means to stand up in a trial in a court and what that looks like. So, I'm curious, just those colleagues, how did they respond when presented with this opportunity?
Peter Banick:
Yeah, I think that's a very fair characterization of our corporate lawyers in our department. So, I think the response on one hand was a little bit nervous. This is a really big issue, and it's an important issue, and it's a difficult one. But on the other hand, they responded with a whole lot of energy. We had a senior member of our law department join as our executive sponsor, and we built the team rather quickly actually.
Peter Banick:
Because I think there's a lot of energy behind the cause. So, it wasn't about us individually as lawyers, it was about what can we do as a department to support this effort?
Peter Banick:
These are difficult cases. It requires a lot of training. There's a significant number of hours invested. As you indicated, it involves litigation and related activities, which we don't do a lot of, if you're outside of our small litigation team.
Peter Banick:
And these are serious criminal offenses. Things like manslaughter, degrees of homicide, felony drug charges. So, it's extraordinarily emotional subject matter for the clients certainly, and even for our volunteers, our lawyers. At the end of the day, we're dealing with people's lives. And most of these clients are dealing with, or serving decades long, or even life sentences, life without parole in many cases. So, they are difficult cases, and I'm really proud of our Aon law colleagues who stepped up for that challenge.
Peter Banick:
But we had a really strong group of colleagues raise their hands because they understood that big picture. They understood the magnitude of the issue, and really wanted to jump in and fight the fight against systemic racism as it continues to perpetuate today.
Andrea O’Leary:
Yeah, and I just want to put an additional kind of plug in there for our listeners is that what you're describing is essentially how change starts. As people lean in, they feel uncomfortable. They're not sure, are they the right people? Do they have the skill sets? All of those questions of doubt run through, but they jump in anyways. And they live into that, and they read into that because they want to make a change. And they want to do something different, and they want to make an impact on these individual's lives.
Andrea O’Leary:
But even greater, the systemic aspects of which that are perpetuating where these individuals are at. And so, you had said you're really proud. And I just want to reiterate my own feelings of just being really proud, and humbled that a group of Aon colleagues were willing to take this on. I think that's amazing. So, where's the project at today, what's happening with your clients?
Peter Banick:
Yeah. So, in early 2021, we filed applications on behalf of all our various clients in the courts throughout Louisiana, for what's called post-conviction relief, which basically means we're asking the court to vacate the conviction because our clients didn't receive a fair and impartial trial.
Peter Banick:
So, there are a number of sort of technical arguments that we won't necessarily go into, but it fundamentally comes down to a matter of fairness and equity. These individuals, our clients, did not receive a constitutional trial, of course by today's standards. And they're serving very, very long prison sentences as a result of a criminal procedural rule that was intentionally designed to harm black residents. And unfortunately, had precisely that effect. So that's really the crux of the argument.
Peter Banick:
Right now, most of our cases are still pending for most of our clients, including mine. We're in discussions with the district attorney's office. And we're trying to negotiate a plea bargain with the prosecuting attorney that would be responsible, if the conviction was to be vacated, and there was to be a new trial.
Peter Banick:
So right now, there's now what's called the circuit split between two courts of appeals in Louisiana. Meaning, one circuit has decided that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that non-unanimous juries, although been non-constitutional, should not be applied retroactively. And another circuit that has decided they should be applied retroactively. So, as you can imagine, we're excited to hear the one circuit deciding that they should be applied retroactively, and a bit disheartened by the other one.
Peter Banick:
But the silver lining there is that the Louisiana Supreme Court is more likely to accept one of our cases being one of the PJI sponsored cases, precisely because there is that circuit split. They don't want different parts of the state deciding rules differently. So, we're hoping that and anxiously awaiting, and optimistically awaiting a decision by the Louisiana Supreme Court that would blanketly apply to all of our clients, across those 1,500 individuals. That's the hope, and we'll certainly be advocating for and continue to be working on our individual cases, but there's still a strong possibility that this could be handled in more sort of wholesale fashion that could benefit all of our clients.
Andrea O’Leary:
Well, you used the word hope a couple of times. And what I'll say is, I think we are all hoping for a positive resolution here, and keeping the hope alive of the individuals' families, and the individuals that you guys are all working for. So just again, thank you so much for this really important work.
Andrea O’Leary:
I want to switch topics a little bit and talk about this amazing thing that happens out of the law team every year. I think they just in 2021 had our second annual Celebrate Pro Bono and Corporate Social Responsibility program that was held. Can you tell us a little bit more about this program and what was the biggest highlights for you?
Peter Banick:
Yeah, I'd love to. We have a strong pro bono and CSR program within the law department, and volunteers actively contributing year-round. But two weeks each fall, we really prioritize pro bono and CSR work. To the extent we can, we create this ambitious two-week schedule of volunteer events, legal clinics, trainings, meetings with nonprofit organizations. And really double down on our commitment to serving our communities, learning about advancing social justice causes and really connecting with our colleagues around matters that are important to them individually as a team and as a firm.
Peter Banick:
And just to give you a few highlights from a number of standpoints as we're a data driven firm, I just want to give you a few of the highlights from 2021. We had 150 Aon law colleagues participate, over 30 separate events with over 25 nonprofit partners. As a department, we dedicated over 1,200 hours over those two weeks. A lot of that time was sort of active volunteerism, participating in clinics and the like.
Peter Banick:
But even more exciting, at least to me, is the fact that we use a lot of that time to train colleagues and establish new projects, which means we're essentially making an investment in the months to come, and the years to come. So, I think that's the highlight for me is that, we have this breadth of offerings and the potential for impact, not just today, but also in months and years to come.
Peter Banick:
And then the other highlight, if I can add one more, was really the inclusivity of the two-week event. It wasn't just for attorneys to provide legal advice. It wasn't just for colleagues in the U.S. or UK, and some of our bigger offices. Like everyone, we've adapted with the pandemic, and learned how to work remotely, work across offices. And this is a program and event that every single colleague in the Global Law Department was invited to participate. And we got really good participation across geographies, across job functions. So, to me, a truly global and Aon United effort.
Andrea O’Leary:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I know we're getting close to our time, but I'm going to ask kind of two more questions. One is actually related to what you were just talking about, which is this idea of sort of inclusivity, and how do we bring more people into the opportunities to partner and create more impact in the communities and with organizations that we serve?
Andrea O’Leary:
And so, I want to specifically talk about, which is how you and I first met each other. Something I know that you're trying to get started in the law group, which is the nonprofit advisory practice. And so, could you spend just a minute or two telling the audience a little bit about what that is, and how that's getting started out of the legal team in the law department?
Peter Banick:
Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully, more to come on this, and then we can cover it just on this talk. But for our colleagues, what we're really talking about here is skills-based volunteering. So, for our law department, that's providing pro bono legal advice for other colleagues, it's providing their own professional skills, whatever they may be.
Peter Banick:
From my perspective, our value proposition if I can call it that, at least compared to law firms in their pro bono work, is that we have 50,000 colleagues at Aon who can support our communities. And like virtually everything we do, it's done better in an Aon United manner. And so, what we're trying to accomplish is thinking about nonprofit organizations at a very strategic organizational level.
Peter Banick:
So, we will always be providing sort of pro bono legal services to individuals at the individual level, and many, many efforts across Aon that provide just volunteer hours for local organizations in a variety of ways.
Peter Banick:
But we're now thinking of doing sort of combining them in saying, how can we support the nonprofit itself as an organization, as an institution, and let them sort of focus on their mission driven work, let us focus on what we do really well. So we might bring one person from the law department, one person from IT, one person from communications, from accounting, whatever the... across functions to say, how can we help you, nonprofit, get better at what you do?
Peter Banick:
Don't worry about your operations in these functional areas, worry about your mission driven client, driven work, let us take responsibility for some of this work, let us help you become stronger as an organization, let us help you become more sustainable, so you can have the impact that you want, and that you envision and that we envision for you. So really engaging them more as an organizational client than at sort of the individual person level.
Andrea O’Leary:
Yeah, I think it's so amazing. I want to just reiterate something you said, which is, you gave this idea of sort of skill based, which is we all have skills, we all work at Aon, 50,000 of us and we have different unique skills that help us be good at the work that we do in our jobs, but how do we bring that to some of these nonprofits, and create more of a strategic advisory opportunity?
Andrea O’Leary:
And I just want to connect for people, so the Black Professionals Network, which is where Peter and I kind of got connected with some work that we were looking to do. We've got a community-based organization, a nonprofit that we work with, and we've been really trying to think about this strategic advisory opportunity with them, and how do we bring the fullness of Aon as we're really partnering with them?
Andrea O’Leary:
And so, I just think the opportunity to get more and more colleagues involved in some of this pro bono aspects, and for them to bring their skill sets and what they're good at, it has so much potential. And so, I'm really, really excited to see how it continues to grow. So, thank you for sharing a little bit about that.
Andrea O’Leary:
So, before we'd sign off, I'd like to ask you one more question, just as an opportunity to get to know you better and the audience to get to know you. What do you wish more colleagues understood about Aon's pro bono work?
Peter Banick:
Yeah, I think that's actually a relatively easy one. I think you answered it for me, Andrea. I think it's that everyone can get involved. So, I think historically, pro bono work was a lawyer went to the courthouse and represented someone in court, and it's just not that anymore. It hasn't been for a long time. That our vision as a pro bono committee for our department is to provide, like I said at the beginning of this conversation, provide the most value we can to who needs it most.
Peter Banick:
That's at the end of the day, our objective. And there are a lot of ways we can do that. And I think the best way we can do that is in an Aon United manner. So, bringing folks across geographies, bringing folks across job functions within even our law department, much less across the 50,000 colleagues, that's how we're going to do it.
Peter Banick:
We're limiting ourselves and our impact to the world, if we just say we want to represent individual clients, or I want to go out and do a project. Let's unleash the power of Aon United for our communities. That's what I want people to understand. So, I guess I'll put in a little plug, and just say, call me, email me, maybe you too, Andrea, if folks are interested. But everyone can get involved. And to your point, unique skills for everyone out there, and we'll love to collaborate more and more over time to bring these types of projects to our communities.
Voiceover:
This has been a conversation “On Aon” and Aon’s pro bono work. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, tune in in two weeks for a discussion with Jillian Slyfield, Aon’s chief innovation officer. To learn more about Aon, its colleagues, solutions and news, check out our show notes, and visit our website at Aon dot com.