Hailyn J. Chen

Chen took over as co-managing partner of Munger, Tolles & Olson in March 2019, the first woman of color to serve in that position. She is on the State Bar’s board of trustees and is the recipient this year of the President’s Award at the Asian Pacific American Women Lawyers Alliance in recognition of her work promoting inclusion, empowerment and advancement of women like her in the legal profession.

She is one of the University of California’s principal litigators, defending the UC system against a range of high-profile suits including a class action by students found responsible for sexual misconduct. Another suit seeks to enjoin the use of standardized testing in admissions decisions.

Chen called her term so far as her firm’s co-managing partner “an eventful tenure.” Two days after she was announced for the post, Munger, Tolles suffered the loss of longtime co-managing partner Sandra Seville-Jones, who died suddenly at age 58 following complications from surgery. “It was quite the shock. She was beloved by my partners and me. Malcolm [Heinicke, Chen’s co-managing partner] and I had to address her unexpected passing.”

“So we got through 2019 and here came 2020,” Chen said wryly of the next challenge to arrive: the coronavirus. Most of her colleagues work from home now. “It’s too early to tell what post-pandemic work life will look like now that we have learned to function away from the office. But we all miss the casual interactions with colleagues. There’s a feeling of something lost there. I suspect some sort of hybrid work life will emerge.”

Among her State Bar board duties, Chen was tasked with planning a temporary supervised provisional attorney licensing program for law school graduates. The draft plan is before the state Supreme Court; consideration of making it retroactive is in the works. “We need to balance competing policy demands and protect the public,” she said.

In her litigation work for the University of California, Chen devised the strategy that defeated a proposed class action by students who claimed due process violations after they were disciplined for sexual misconduct. “This was the tip of the spear of cases filed across the U.S. by a consortium of lawyers testing their ability to seek damages in these cases,” she said. Doe v. Regents of the University of California, RG19029617 (Alameda Co. Sup. Ct., filed Aug. 1, 2019).

Chen demurred, successfully seeking judicial notice that the plaintiffs had filed personal claims previously, a fact that demonstrated that individual issues would predominate, making their claims unsuitable for class treatment.

“By shutting down this case we avoided broad class action liability for our client,” Chen said.

— John Roemer