Meghan Stoppel:

Welcome to the second season of State AG Pulse. In this season, we will be releasing a new podcast episode every two weeks. In addition to providing a deep dive into those headlines that showcase the enormous power and broad authority of state attorneys general, we’ll be talking with new AGs about their transition into office and their priorities. Like last season, we’ll leverage our decades of experience to provide our listeners with insight and perspective to help business leaders better understand and successfully work with state AGs. Listen for new voices as co-chairs Bernie Nash and Lori Kalani share the host mic with other members of Cozen O’Connor’s State AG Group. So now let’s jump right into this week’s episode.

Lori Kalani:

Welcome to our third episode of season two of the State AG Pulse podcast. Very exciting episode today. I’m here with my law partner, Ann-Marie Luciano.

Ann-Marie Luciano:

That’s me.

Lori Kalani:

And the honorable attorney general from Illinois, Kwame Raoul. Hi, everybody. So happy to be spending this time with you.

AG Kwame Raoul:

Hi, Lori. Thanks for having me. Thanks for inviting me to be with you today.

Lori Kalani:

Oh yeah, we’re really excited. Obviously, it’s like saying Happy New Year in February, I’ll say Happy New Year, and I’ll say congratulations again on your victory last November. There was a Seinfeld episode or a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where they said you only had two or three days to say those things, so I’m already breaking the rules.

AG Kwame Raoul:

Yeah, I always wondered what the cutoff day was for saying Happy New Year and what the day is to take down your Christmas tree and all of those things. I tend to go beyond those deadlines.

Lori Kalani:

Yeah.

Ann-Marie Luciano:

Same.

AG Kwame Raoul:

All the time.

 

Lori Kalani:

Same here, exactly. So somebody sent me the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, so I guess they were trying to tell me something. So to whoever that was, I’ve broken the rule again. Anyhow, thrilled to have you here and we thought it would be a great conversation. Ann-Marie Luciano is one of our star attorneys in the State AG Group, and Ann-Marie really has spent the last dozen or so years (I’m bad with numbers) on working on really some of the biggest investigations in the country that involve AGs and our clients. So I thought it would be great to have her here to join us to talk to you. And-

Ann-Marie Luciano:

Yeah, on that point, I just want to say that both with multi-state investigations involving Illinois as well as individual investigations just by Illinois of our clients, I’ve always had nothing but a great experience working with staff, both high level staff, front office staff down to line attorneys, resourceful, willing to be practical, find solutions, efficient. Very, very professional friendly experience with your staff.

AG Kwame Raoul:

Well, I’m glad to hear that affirmation. I try to communicate to my staff that, whether it’s in an investigation or ongoing litigation, while a caption may demonstrate something as an adversarial proceeding, at the end of the day, the objective is to get a just, reasonable result. And that doesn’t mean you have to be unnecessarily vitriolic or anything like that in exchanges. And you have to be willing to listen for facts that you may have been unaware of as you set out in an investigation or if it escalates to litigation even at a point of where there’s ongoing litigation.

Ann-Marie Luciano:

Absolutely. And I think it works out better that way, both for the consumers and ultimately for our clients to reach a resolution without protracted arguments.

Lori Kalani:

There’s a lot we could talk about on investigations and how the office works, but speaking of the election, I just wanted to ask you, since we are still in the beginning of the new year of your new term, can you talk to us a little bit about any changes you might have made going into your new term? Have you seen a lot of turnover in your office since the election?

AG Kwame Raoul:

No. No. And one of the things that’s fascinating, I’m speaking to you from Springfield, and just a couple hours ago we had a legislative reception where we hosted a lot of members of our legislature, and I was pleased that we had a good bipartisan turnout at our reception. But one of the things that I shared with a lot of the legislators is: I’ve been very aggressive about going into them and asking for increased appropriations every year. And my predecessor was not as aggressive at doing that. In 2018, the year that I was elected, the National Association of Attorneys General did a survey, I think 48 states responded on attrition, and we had the worst attrition rate in the country.

And so I’ve set out over the last four years to change that. And some of that was asking for more resources, but some of that was making, trying to make the office a more pleasant place to be: breaking down silos within the office; having different events to just lift up our attorneys and our staff; giving them an opportunity to work on things that historically they may not have had an opportunity to work on; recruiting some new staff that allowed us to begin to get more involved in other areas of an AG practice. And I think a combination of all those things has led to people wanting to stay here and be here. And so we’re happy about that.

Lori Kalani:

That says a lot, especially with COVID because that, I know we talked a lot during that time. I think one day I talked to you, and you were the only person in the whole office. Everybody was working from home. And I know for us as a law firm and certainly for the AGs I talked to, that was a very challenging time to keep that comradery and keep people excited.

AG Kwame Raoul:

Well, it was made more difficult for us than probably every other AG office in the country because not only did we have the pandemic come and shift us kind of instantaneously into a remote working environment that we had not ever experienced before [but] during that time in 2021, we were hit with the ransomware cyberattack that compromised our use of technology. And if you think when you’re shifting to a remote working situation, you are heavily reliant on your access to technology to do the work of the office. And so we had to really adapt, and I really am pleased with our staff for giving us the patience, having the patience to work with us to get everybody back on board, to be able to complete their task and represent the state, represent the people.

Lori Kalani:

As a state with one of the, I would say, most sophisticated privacy units run by some great lawyers, I’m sure that was a shock and a challenge to deal with that. I know we as a law firm said, well, we need to check in with the AG’s office to see what was compromised because we had documents there, and I’m sure you were getting those requests from other firms, so it had to be a complete mess.

AG Kwame Raoul:

But there’s a silver lining in it. I think we’re better than we were as a result of it. We’re actually partnering with the Department of Homeland Security to do trainings for both corporate interests and governmental interests on cybersecurity. Our practices are better. Our sensitivity to corporate entities that we have to police after data breach is increased. So what we spoke about earlier, being reasonable with folks and so forth, having gone through the experience ourselves gives us another perspective.

Lori Kalani:

Yeah, that’s a really good point. I’m sure you didn’t pay the fines though that some of our clients pay, but that’s for another conversation. I have to say, we were looking at your priorities for your new term and what you said when you were being sworn in. And some of the things that you’re working on are, well, I’d say they’re all really important: fighting crime, advocating for women, supporting survivors of domestic violence, protecting kids from online predators, affordable healthcare, voting rights, and standing with workers. I mean, those are all big priorities.

And I know that you have a big office and I’d say in some of those areas the work is never done. As much as you do and as much change as you make the work is really never done. And on that note, I want to talk about the Worker Protection Unit that you stood up when you came in. I mean, you are not the only AG who has done that, and I know there’s a lot of work there, but I would love for you to give our listeners a sense of what that unit looks like and some of the issues that it’s working on today.

AG Kwame Raoul:

Yeah, sure. So a little history on that. When I was in the legislature, I had introduced legislation to create, legislatively, within the AG’s office, a Workers’ Protection Unit, and give it the power to bypass our state Department of Labor when they’re investigating a violation of one of our labor laws. The history was that in some instances the Department of Labor would drag their feet in investigations and sometimes make referrals to the AG’s office after the statute of limitations had expired. So we thought it necessary back then to introduce legislation, not in all cases, but in excessive cases, to give the AG power to take action before a referral. And so we did stand up. It was vetoed when I introduced it when I was in the legislature. One of the roles of the AG’s office is also to be a legislative advocate, so we asked, and we had bipartisan sponsors. We had a Republican sponsor in the Senate and a Democrat sponsor in the house. So it was passed again and Governor Pritzker signed it into law and we went into action with it. Certainly, during the pandemic, there was adapting workplaces to the protections that needed to be in place for essential workers, whether it was workers in meat processing facilities and healthcare settings or whatever, making sure that they had their adequate PPP and other protections and whether they knew that they were being protected as best as possible from this new pandemic that we were learning about week by week. So we were really busy there, but at the same token, we also had instances where there were schemes to pay people off the books and abusing the ability to have independent contractors. And oftentimes they were paying people who were undocumented; paying them below the wage that is mandated by our minimum wage laws. So we had some very sophisticated investigations. There was one that was involved in central Illinois involving the Rivian electric vehicle plant, and we had to translate some documents that were in Mandarin to get to the bottom of the… and fortunately, we had somebody in office who was able to do that to get to the bottom of that case. And we were able to recover lost wages for those individuals and to change practices. And so we’ve had a couple of those investigations.

Ann-Marie Luciano:

I did notice in your inaugural report on your workplace unit, all these different actions that you’ve taken against companies that have either not paid wages at the appropriate rate or somehow circumvented your labor laws. I also noticed that your office has taken some action against companies that use no poach agreements or non-compete agreements. And I was wondering if you can talk to us about what you foresee over the next couple of years in that regard, and in terms of enforcement action, either by your office or in conjunction with other AGs. As you probably are aware, there have been multiple AG offices who have decided to start taking action against companies who use non-competes and no poach agreements. And that’s something of great interest.

AG Kwame Raoul:

Yeah, so we’re in an environment where the nature of the labor market is different, the approaches to the employer employee relationship is different. You’ve got entities that are trying to maximize profits. Everybody’s in business for…

Ann-Marie Luciano:

For profit.

AG Kwame Raoul:

For profit, that’s understandable. However, we had to make sure, in the exercise of strategic decision-making, that we protect our middle class, and we make sure we have a middle class, right? And we make sure that folks are given an opportunity to fully participate in the workforce and not be compromised by policies that create obstacles to them being able to do so. I understand and appreciate folks may have privacy concerns and business secrets and so forth that they want to make sure they protect from competitors and so forth. But at the same token, there’s an interest of making sure that if somebody is laid off or somebody wants to initiate trying to climb and make more resources for their family elsewhere, that they’re not unduly restricted.

Ann-Marie Luciano:

Your enforcement actions haven’t been focused on higher level, higher wage employees who have trade secrets, but more of the lower wage workers.

AG Kwame Raoul:

Exactly, that’s a great point. When you are really thinking about protecting trade secrets and so forth, oftentimes, it is not those lower-level employees that are in possession of such intellectual property that they pose any sort of risk to such secrets being breached.

Lori Kalani:

And some of them may not even understand what it is they’re being asked to agree to sign up for.

AG Kwame Raoul:

That’s right.

Lori Kalani:

I mean, that makes me think, and you may already do this, but it would be interesting for AGs’ offices who are particularly interested in this, to have some sort of, as part of their outreach to the communities in the state to help educate the consumers, the citizens, right, About what is really allowed and what isn’t, right? And I know it’s accessible, but I think that’s just an area of outreach that the office may already be doing, and if not, then might consider doing.

AG Kwame Raoul:

No, you touched on something we just spoke about within office today. We have an outreach group within our office that works hand in hand with our worker protection and the enforcement arm of our worker protection because if people don’t even realize that they’re being taken advantage of, it’s difficult to protect them. Some of that comes with folks who speak English as a second language. Being able to communicate to them their cultural concerns and so forth that you need to be able to have the cultural competency, to be able to communicate to folks that, have them have a willingness to communicate to the office. Because we are a law enforcement office, so folks may not appreciate that we have their best interests at heart and they may be intimidated with regards to speaking to our office about how they are subjected to abuse.

Lori Kalani:

That makes a lot of sense to me. I commend you on your robocall efforts and the work that you’re doing there. I worked at the FCC many years ago and robocalls, you thought they were gone. You thought telemarketing was gone and here it is and we’re still talking about it in 2023. But one thing that really caught our attention is your work on voter rights. I have to say one of our law partners just went to be the second-in-charge of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and she is passionate about voting rights and said, “Darn it, this is Pennsylvania and I have this great appointed job by now Governor Shapiro, and I’m going to go work on this to make sure the 2024 election, at least in Pennsylvania isn’t a disaster.” And so I know that that’s really a priority for you and something that Ann-Marie is really passionate about and would love to hear a little bit about your work in that area.

AG Kwame Raoul:

I’m fairly passionate about it as well. As a legislator, I was a chief sponsor of two initiatives, one: what we call the Illinois Voting Rights Act, which actually goes beyond federal voting rights protection with regards to protecting communities of interest in [the] redistricting process. And it’s resulted in [a] more diverse legislature here in the state of Illinois. Additionally, I look to what’s happening in other states. You mentioned Pennsylvania. My mother, who passed away maybe six months after I was sworn in the first time, I remember her in her late 80s waiting hours to vote in Florida, even when she was taking advantage of early voting. And so where efforts, no matter where they are in the country, are made to make voting more difficult. I think of my mom. I’ve been criticized for joining multi-state efforts and weighing in on what may happen in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, other places. But we have to realize what happens in those states with regards to an assault on voting rights, undermining our democracy by questioning legitimate election, impacts the state of Illinois, even if it’s something that’s happening in another state. So that’s why we’ve lent our voices. We haven’t had the issues that we see in some other states here in the state of Illinois, but we’re on watch because anything that happens in another state can spread over.

Ann-Marie Luciano:

Your office had I think 170 different teams of assistant AGs to monitor the last election in November and I was curious as to what commonalities you found, and whether or not those are the same type of issues that your colleagues in other states are experiencing.

AG Kwame Raoul:

For the most part, we have not had the same type of issues, but what I’ve also told my team when we go into election protection mode, because I remember I started my career as a prosecutor in the Cook County Attorney’s Office, and when elections came around, we would have to go out and go from polling place to polling place on election day. But if you think these days with early voting with mail-in voting, with all of these different tools to allow for more involvement in voting and better ease to vote, election protection becomes a little bit more complex. It’s no longer going from polling place to polling place on election day because election day can, depending on which state you’re in, could be two to three weeks. I’ve charged my team to think about not just slipping into the traditional mode of election protection, and then think about today’s potential challenges with protecting the integrity of elections.

Lori Kalani:

There’s a lot of work there and it changes, and I would say it gets better. There’s relief for people like your mother who was standing out in the Florida heat in late October. Hopefully, there’s improvements to make it easier for people to vote. It’s funny, I know you’ve done a lot on student loan servicing, and I was thinking about you, General. You’re protecting the students, you’re protecting the children from online predators, protecting workers when they get to the office and start working, and then you’re protecting the elderly. You’re sort of covering the whole gamut, which really says a lot about the way you think about things, and the way your office thinks about things. We, and I say that collectively, our group, we think a lot about consumer protection, and we think a lot about antitrust and the environment, but there’s really so much more that your office is doing besides the consumer protection pieces. That’s just one piece of it. Tell me how much money you collected in consumer protection settlements, isn’t it…?

AG Kwame Raoul:

Yeah, I don’t even know what the figure is, but I can tell you that, and I’m sitting as I speak to you across the street from our state capitol. This is the season where we put in our request for appropriation, and I told the legislature last year, for every dollar of general revenue fund money they spent on the attorney general’s office, we returned $39 to the state. I said, if you can show me an investment that does that for you or another agency that does that for you… So we’re proud of the efforts that we make on behalf of consumers and on behalf of the people of the state of Illinois at large. If you look at all of our surrounding states, there are either existing laws or laws that are being proposed and passed to restrict access to reproductive healthcare. And there are some deceptive practices being used by crisis pregnancy centers that redirect people who are seeking care at clinics. So we are exploring how we use our great history of protecting consumers in this area of access to reproductive healthcare. We’ve also advocated for and drafted legislation that was recently passed in our lame-duck session to protect healthcare providers and patients who may come from other states that are enacting laws that are suggesting that even if you access care in another state, when you come home, we can prosecute you, so we are protecting their private healthcare information and so forth. We just passed a law to enable us to effectively do that.

Ann-Marie Luciano:

You had a round table that you held last fall with reproductive rights organizations to brainstorm ideas as to how your office can further protect women’s rights. You sent letters to law enforcement reminding them of women’s rights in Illinois to provide access. Have you seen, has your office heard complaints of women being told in Illinois that they were not permitted to receive reproductive care in light of Dobbs?

AG Kwame Raoul:

We haven’t really seen that and it’s important to understand Illinois from a national perspective. It’s easy to reflexively say, “Oh, Illinois is a blue state, and they’re going to be all about access to reproductive healthcare and so forth.” No, we have a diverse state. And so when you think about that directive that we gave to law enforcement, we did it with an understanding that we have law enforcement heads in different parts of the state with different political perspectives and different perspectives on abortion.

Lori Kalani:

General, you sit on the NAAG, I think you’re co-chair of, the NAAG Consumer Protection Committee. That’s the National Association of Attorneys General for those who don’t know that. And we’ve heard you talk a lot about restitution in enforcement actions versus penalties or payments to the state. And just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. When you’re looking at companies and saying, you violated the law, and we want you to change your business practices going forward, is it your preference where possible and where, I guess, practical to send money directly back to those consumers of those companies? Or is it more so to just pay the money as a deterrent effect going forward?

AG Kwame Raoul:

Yeah, and the answer is: the answer depends, but the spirit of what restitution would be because not in all cases, restitution isn’t easy to identify and put into effect if you take… for instance, opioids, collectively, we’ve put the heavy focus on updating the problem and it’s not about… If we were just putting dollars back into the pockets of everybody who had purchased an opioid-based pharmaceutical or who’d become addicted to opioids, that would not take any bite out of the underlying problem. Having those resources go towards abating the problem, drug treatment and prevention and so forth is important. And the other thing that you mentioned is the importance of changing practices. All too often people focus on the dollar amounts and it’s important, but the injunctive relief and the agreements to change practices are important. Now, in cases, like you mentioned, like student lending and so forth, the restitution, that’s type of a situation where restitution is easier to identify and to get it back directly into the hands of the people who were victimized. What we don’t want is to repeat tobacco where it’s just a bonanza for state budget. The money is just going to state’s general revenue funds to-

Lori Kalani:

Build bridges.

AG Kwame Raoul:

And so that’s not our interest.

Lori Kalani:

I just have to say, you’re… There’s been a long line of great AGs in Illinois, but you are really great and accessible and reasonable and just an all-around nice guy, so thrilled to have you on podcast with us. And I’ll ask you one last question, if I might. There are 16 new AGs in office this January, and that’s a lot, about a third. And I would say as an old hat at the job now, if you could give them any advice, what would that advice be to your new colleagues, some of whom you’ve probably not yet met?

AG Kwame Raoul:

It’d be similar to the advice that my predecessor gave me. She acknowledged that she didn’t participate as much in some of the meetings that bring AGs together. I have really jumped in and participated in those meetings, and it’s been hugely beneficial to me. As I mentioned earlier, at a group of legislators who stopped by our legislative reception earlier today – and most of them were new legislators – the advice I gave them is, don’t just hang around people who are just like-minded. Get to know all of your colleagues. Spend time with them. I’ve done so in the AG space, I’ve gotten to know people who, as I read stories about them, I would think, oh, there’s no way I could sit down and break bread with that person. But I’ve been able to do so and get to know them get to know their spouses, and learn about them personally and learn about how much we have in common, notwithstanding the fact that there are some causes that have us aligned on different sides of various issues and…

Ann-Marie Luciano:

Especially in this highly partisan era. For sure.

Lori Kalani:

Yeah, that’s for sure. And we always say AGs seem to come together on consumer protection. But that I’d say the answer to that is: it depends, right? So you doing that and you making the effort and taking the initiative to meet the people, as you say, you don’t necessarily agree with on a hundred percent of the issues is really commendable. And something that I hope AGs continue to do. It certainly makes our job easier as lawyers who are representing companies in front of your offices.

AG Kwame Raoul:

It’s a little precarious time in the AG space, right? We want to preserve the nonpartisan, sort of bipartisan collaboration where we can. AG Yost is at the helm of NAAG this year, and I think he’s done a good job thus far, bringing us together to very intentionally work on just that. And so I think it’s important for people to know that there’s communication and collaboration across party line amongst AGs and there are genuine, genuine friendships across party line as well. And I think both are important to preserve.

Lori Kalani:

That’s great advice and a great way to end this podcast. So I can’t thank you enough. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. I know you’re busy in your state capital, but we really appreciate the time you took to talk to us. It’s always a pleasure. And Ann-Marie, thank you.

Ann-Marie Luciano:

Thank you, General.

Lori Kalani:

Always a pleasure. And we hope to see you soon.

AG Kwame Raoul:

Thanks. Thanks for having me, and see you soon.

Lori Kalani:

All right, thank you.

Meghan Stoppel:

You have been listening to State AG Pulse, brought to you by Cozen O’Connor’s State AG Group. Research for this podcast was provided by our associates. Ryan Bottegal, Hannah Cornett, Keturah Taylor, and Emily Yu, as well as our policy analyst, Elisabeth Hill Hodish. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review. This will help our visibility and will allow other listeners to learn about the podcast. And of course, please tune in again in two weeks for our next episode.