ABA to honor Accenture with Champions for Disability Inclusion in the Legal Profession Award
The American Bar Association will honor Accenture, a leading global professional services company that provide services that span strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations services, with its Champions for Disability Inclusion in the Legal Profession Award.
The ABA Commission on Disability Rights selected Accenture for its commitment to and leadership in creating and sustaining an inclusive, barrier-free work environment where persons with disabilities across the globe experience a real sense of belonging, can be who they are, and perform at their full potential.
The award will be presented at the Commission’s Reception for Lawyers with Disabilities during the 2018 ABA Annual Meeting in Chicago. The reception will take place Monday, Aug. 6, from 5-7 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, Columbus Hall GH, East Tower, Ballroom Level.
The Champions award recognizes a corporation that has made measurable progress in the recruitment, hiring, retention and advancement to leadership positions of individuals with disabilities. Accenture has signed and actively recruited several of its law firm partners to sign the Commission’s Disability Diversity in the Legal Profession: A Pledge for Change, which signifies an organization’s commitment to disability diversity.
Accenture is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities through technology, specifically assistive technologies, and workplace-related modifications.
In 2017, Accenture launched an Accessibility Center of Excellence (CoE) to proactively address the needs of its employees and its goal of continually improving each employee’s online user experience.
Each year throughout the month of December, Accenture celebrates International Day of Persons with Disabilities in more than 22 countries around the world, hosting global virtual events that are open to all employees and external guests. Accenture’s Persons with Disabilities Champions Network, with its 14,000 plus members, sponsors local networking, collaboration, mentoring and awareness-building activities for persons with disabilities, as well as caretakers and colleagues.
Building strong partnerships with other organizations allows Accenture to expand persons with disabilities sourcing. Its Skills to Succeed corporate citizenship initiative advances employment and entrepreneurship opportunities for individuals around the globe by using technology to drive impact at scale.1
Research: Minority high-crime rate communities want more protection, less punishment from police
A new study by American Bar Foundation (ABF) Research Professor John Hagan and co-authors examines the paradox that high-crime rate communities where residents are skeptical of police also rely heavily on 911 calls for police assistance. In a new article on “Racial Isolation, Legal Cynicism and Reported Crime,” published online last week in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Hagan and co-authors Bill McCarthy, Daniel Herda, and Andrea Cann Chandrasekher present an explanation of this paradox. Professor Hagan reports that “we set out to determine why residents of these neighborhoods call 911 if they do not trust law enforcement. Our analysis shows that neighborhood residents call in the desperate hope — despite past disappointment and lacking alternatives — that police will provide more protection and prevention.”
Hagan and his co-authors further examine how residents are unconsciously and consciously influenced by historical understandings that have developed over long periods of time. A result — especially in disadvantaged and racially isolated African-American neighborhoods — is a tendency toward “legal cynicism,” or a shared disbelief in the law, police and the criminal justice system that persists alongside frequent calls for police assistance. Using survey and census data from neighborhoods in Chicago, Hagan and his colleagues find that this cynicism dates historically from experiences of inequality — from slavery, through Jim Crow laws, to contemporary residential racial isolation, segregation and economic disadvantage. These factors join with higher mass incarceration rates among minority men and higher rates of home foreclosures and evictions among minority families, which are continuing sources of distrust in law enforcement and neighborhood policing.
Through survey and official data gathered over several decades in Chicago, Hagan and his co-authors show that the problems of policing in high-crime rate, minority neighborhoods are far more complex and deeply entrenched than is acknowledged or resolved by reliance on policies of punishment and mass incarceration. The responses residents most seek are prevention and protection.
