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Webinar

Time to Update the Playbook: The Expanded Lineup of Federal Higher Education Regulators

March 30, 2026 | 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT

Event Details

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About this Event

The federal regulatory landscape for higher education institutions has evolved significantly under the current administration. Colleges and universities are now interacting with an expanded roster of regulatory bodies from across the federal government, including the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – and even the White House itself. As the regulatory environment evolves, counsel must contend with less predictability, as well as a much wider range of authority, statutory interpretations, enforcement priorities, and operating approaches. The result is greater uncertainty for institutions and increasingly complex considerations for college and university attorneys. Now more than ever, institutions need an updated playbook for interacting with federal regulators.

  • The variety of federal investigative and enforcement actions being brought against colleges and universities, and the key statutes, regulatory authorities, and policy directives undergirding these efforts;
  • Considerations that heighten the complexity of campus responses to federal regulators’ investigatory and enforcement demands, including competing legal and other obligations;
  • A comparison of how federal regulators’ approach to colleges and universities has evolved over time; and
  • Practical considerations for campus counsel when responding to regulators’ information requests or when working to resolve enforcement actions that may arise.

Please join us for this two-hour webinar where our presenters will discuss topics including:

Who Should Attend?

This webinar will be of interest to all college and university counsel as well as campus administrator colleagues who advise campuses on their wide range of federal legal and regulatory compliance obligations. This webinar will also be of interest to those counsel and administrators charged with leading, coordinating, and supporting campus responses to federal investigations and enforcement actions.

Speakers

Hailyn Chen

Co-Managing Partner

Munger, Tolles & Olson

Hailyn Chen is a Munger, Tolles & Olson litigation partner and Co-Managing Partner of the firm.  

Ms. Chen is known as a leader inside and outside the courtroom, with a practice focused on complex business litigation, white collar criminal defense, and government and internal investigations. She has earned a reputation as one of the nation’s leading lawyers, in particular for matters involving higher education institutions or allegations of sexual misconduct in a range of litigation matters and investigations. Ms. Chen has paved the way for other women attorneys of color to excel in their practices and drive initiatives for diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.   

Ms. Chen is recognized in the 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America and in the Los Angeles Business Journal’s 2024 Leaders of Influence: Litigators and Trial Attorneys List. In 2023, Ms. Chen was recognized by the Daily Journal in its Top 100 Lawyers List for her investigations practice, including leading an internal investigation on behalf of UC Berkeley into allegations of abuse, bullying and discriminatory conduct by longtime head coach of UC Berkeley Women’s Swimming, Teri McKeever. She also served as lead counsel in an independent internal investigation into decades of alleged sexual abuse at the Thacher School, an elite boarding school in Ojai, California. In 2021, Ms. Chen was listed among California’s “Top Women Lawyers” by the Daily Journal for the fourth consecutive year and, in 2020, she was named “Managing Partner of the Year” by Corporate Counsel. 

Ms. Chen is an immediate past member of the Board of Trustees of the State Bar of California, having served for seven years on the Board as an appointee of the California Supreme Court. She is a member of the State Bar Board’s Ad Hoc Committee on Oversight and Accountability Reforms and has testified on those topics at Joint Oversight Hearings of the Senate Judiciary and Assembly Judiciary Committees. She also serves on the UCLA School of Law Advisory Board, which advises the Dean of the UCLA Law School on significant issues. Ms. Chen is a member of the board of directors of the Attorney Liability Assurance Society (ALAS), the nation’s largest lawyer-owned mutual, insuring 222 premier law firms with over 76,000 lawyers around the world. 

She has been quoted in numerous publications including The American Lawyer, the Daily Journal, and in 2022 co-authored an article published by the National Association of College and University Attorneys, “Sexual Misconduct Arising Out of Student Health, Athletic Medicine, and Academic Medical Centers,” the first-of-its-kind comprehensive overview of best practices in responding to sexual misconduct in the healthcare context. 

Ms. Chen earned her undergraduate degree from Yale University, where she was one of the first female coxswains to lead the Yale varsity men’s crew and was awarded the MVP award in 1996. 

Sonya Sanchez

Sonya Sanchez is Managing Counsel for Education Affairs and Governance at the University of California System. She joined the Office of the General Counsel as Senior Counsel for the Litigation group in November 2015, overseeing a wide variety of litigated matters, including personal injury, First Amendment, DACA and sexual misconduct litigation, including Title IX litigation. In addition to managing sexual misconduct litigation, she advises on complex policy, regulatory and crisis management issues arising in the sexual misconduct arena. 

She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Wellesley College, a M. Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. 

Program Schedule

TimeSession Topic
12:00 P.M.Welcome and Introductions
12:05 P.M.Overview of current enforcement landscape and priorities
1:00 P.M.Q&A
1:15 P.M.Practical considerations for responding to regulators’ requests or enforcement actions.
1:45 P.M.Q&A
2:00 PMConclusion

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Webinar Recording

Members who purchase the Live Webinar will receive access to the Post-Event Recording in the Online Learning Center at no additional charge. Non-members will not have post-event access to the recording or the materials and should plan to download materials during the live webinar.

If you are a member and couldn’t attend live, the event recording will be available for purchase in our Online Learning Center. The recording may be replayed at any time, but may not be copied, posted, or otherwise distributed within or outside of the institution, organization, or firm. The license entitles the purchaser to replay the recording at one campus or at one location of any organization or firm. You can purchase the Post-Event Recording here.

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