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As General Counsel for the American Red Cross, Mary S. Elcano serves as the chief legal officer responsible for litigation and advice to the Red Cross corporate headquarters, chapters, and blood services regions for general corporate law, employment and labor law, ethics, ADR/mediation, federal regulatory matters, international law, estates and trusts and major Red Cross policy issues.
Elcano also serves as the Corporate Secretary to the Board of Governors and the American Red Cross senior management. In that capacity she is responsible for Board resolutions and corporate records as well as advising the Board on ethics and corporate governance matters, organizing meeting agendas, minutes, logistics and planning for Board and Committee meetings. Elcano is also responsible for the strategic direction and management of the local, state and federal government relations for the Red Cross. This covers the key partnerships in those areas as well as organizing the necessary grassroots support to the various Red Cross chapter and blood services regions.
Before joining the Red Cross, she was a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin LLP. Elcano had an extensive practice in two areas. First, in a Postal Service practice, she advised and represented clients on postal matters in the United States and internationally. Clients included large direct mail marketing companies, express freight shippers, national logistics and printing companies, and the paper and envelope industry. Elcano has written and spoken extensively on Postal Service topics and co-authored three chapters in books. In her second area, Elcano represented clients in employment law, focusing on diversity, discrimination and alternative dispute resolution (ADR). At Sidley, she introduced Workplace Innovations in Negotiated Solutions (WINS), a comprehensive set of ADR tools customized to fit a client’s corporate culture and goals. She has lectured and co-authored numerous articles in ADR and employment law.
Over a career spanning 18 years, Elcano began working at the U.S. Postal Service in 1982 as an employment law attorney, moved on to successive senior management positions in Human Resources and culminated her career as the USPS General Counsel and Executive Vice President of Human Resources in 2000. As General Counsel, she was responsible for federal and corporate practice areas, legislative matters, litigation/ADR and was counsel to the Board of Governors. In her capacity as Executive Vice President of Human Resources, Ms. Elcano directed the USPS employment, labor relations and diversity areas for an 800,000 employee workforce and created an ADR program for the Postal Service – REDRESS – a mediation program for the Postal Service’s 30,000 EEO complaints, which resulted in a 50 percent reduction in such complaints in two years.
Elcano, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Arbitration Association and a principal in the Council for Excellence in Government, graduated with a J.D. from Catholic University Law School and with a B.A. from Lynchburg College. She attended Executive Management programs at the University of Virginia (1985) and Duke University (1991). | 