Biography of Jill Wine-Banks
Jill Wine-Banks combines experience as a senior corporate executive and nonprofit CEO and COO with a successful legal career in government and private practice and service on corporate and civic boards. She began her career as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, where her trial capabilities and win record led to her selection as one of the three Assistant Watergate Special Prosecutors in the Watergate obstruction of justice trial against President Nixon's top aides and naming the President an unindicted co-conspirator.
Ms. Wine-Banks then entered private practice at a prestigious Washington, D.C. firm, Fried Frank Harris Shriver and Kampelman, before being named General Counsel of the U.S. Army by President Carter. In the Pentagon, she supervised the world's largest law firm and was a member of the Army Policy and Procurement Councils. At the end of the Carter Administration, Ms. Wine-Banks returned to her hometown, Chicago, as a partner at Jenner and Block and later as Solicitor General and Deputy Attorney General of Illinois. In that role, she argued in the US and Illinois Supreme Courts, supervised all Illinois appellate cases and the Office of the Attorney General.
A national search led to her appointment as the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the American Bar Association, the largest professional association in America, followed by a successful corporate career at Motorola and Maytag. At Motorola, Jill was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of Motorola's joint venture cellular operating company in St. Petersburg, Russia and worked on numerous ventures in Pakistan, Ukraine, China, Europe and more. After seven years at Motorola, Ms. Wine-Banks was recruited to serve as Maytag's Vice President of Alliance Management.
Ms. Wine-Banks left Maytag to serve as CEO of Winning Workplaces, a nonprofit dedicated to helping small business be more profitable by being better workplaces; and then from 2003 through 2008, Ms. Wine-Banks served the Chicago Public Schools as Chief Officer of career and technical education under Arne Duncan, working with Chicago's corporate community, post-secondary educational institutions, and government agencies.
Her corporate board experience includes her service as a member of the Board of Directors of Cenvill Development Corporation, a retirement home and real estate development company in West Palm Beach, Florida, and for Ashworth, a for-profit education company in the Sterling Partners Portfolio. In 2014, she was appointed by the Secretary of Defense as a member of the Judicial Proceedings Panel's Subcommittee on Sexual Assault, where she will serve until June 2017. She also currently serves as Vice Chair on the ESC Board of Directors, and as a member of the President's Advisory Council of Governors State University and on the Advisory Board of the National Veterans Museum. She is active in The Chicago Network where she was formerly on the Board, as well as the Board of the International Women's Forum, as well as the Board of the ACLU, the Board of Advisors of Roosevelt, the Board of Overseers of IIT's Kent Law School, and as Fundraising Co-Chair of the Journalism School at UIUC and the boards of Operation Green Jobs and Project Lead the Way.
She is a frequent speaker for professional and business groups and has been the recipient of many awards, including several from the United States Department of Justice and the highest civilian award given by the United States Department of the Army, as well as awards from the Girl Scouts, the YWCA, the Women's Bar Association, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who in America and other editions. Her educational background includes a B.S. in Communications from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law in New York City, and an Honorary Doctor of Law from Hood College.
