D. Cameron Findlay
General Counsel
Aon Corporation is a leading provider of insurance and risk management, human capital consulting, and insurance underwriting. It is one of the top 200 companies on the Fortune 500 list, operating from approximately 600 offices in more than 120 countries and sovereignties, with 47,000 employees worldwide. Its 2004 revenues topped $10 billion, a five percent increase over the previous year.
(L to R): Roderick Palmore, Sara Lee Corporation; D. Cameron Findlay, Aon Corporation; and Veta Richardson, MCCA
D. Cameron Findlay, executive vice president and general counsel, leads the legal department in embracing the corporation’s value of diversity. The composition of Aon’s U.S. law department shows its efforts to attract and retain a diverse workforce have paid off. Of its 44 U.S. attorneys, 45 percent are female and 15 percent are minorities. Internationally, its efforts are even more impressive: Beyond the U.S., more than 71 percent of Aon’s attorneys are women or minorities, four of its six deputy general counsel-level supervisors are women, and two are African American.
Its law department has initiated specific efforts to ensure that vendors, including outside counsel, complement Aon’s value of diversity. Amid cost-cutting efforts, the department has consolidated suppliers, and diversity is a key selection criterion for new and current vendors. As it launched a new request for proposal process for selecting national law firms, Aon expected interested firms to have an existing diversity initiative. The corporation also requested current statistics, including the number of women and minority partners and associates. Aon noted that the firms best qualified to handle Aon’s matters were also the most diverse.
“Aon is committed to nondiscrimination and diversity, both with regard to its own legal staff and to the outside lawyers who advise and represent it,” says Findlay. “This commitment is not just good business, it is absolutely the right thing to do.”
Going forward, Aon has told the selected firms that it expects them to staff its matters with teams that reflect the diversity of this country. In addition to its national firms, Aon has pledged to share its $30- to $40-million outside counsel budget with women- and minority-owned firms. In January 2003, Aon joined the Corporate and Public Entities Partnering Program (CPEPP) of the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms. As a CPEPP corporate partner, Aon agreed to set a goal of spending a minimum of five percent of its annual outside counsel budget with minority- and women-owned law firms.
In other business practices, Aon strives to take diversity into account. Effective January 1, 2004, Aon began offering domestic partner benefits to its U.S. employees. It works to prime the pipeline so it and its corporate contemporaries can expect to find diverse talent readily in the years to come. Aon’s partnerships include organizations such as INROADS, an international organization that helps businesses gain greater access to diverse talent through internship positions; the Monster Campus Diversity Leadership Program, which holds six regional conferences in July and August to introduce in-demand young candidates from diverse ethnic backgrounds to an elite group of corporate partners to discuss career possibilities; and traditional black colleges, such as Howard University.
From the November/December 2005 issue of Diversity & The Bar®