Hailyn Chen is a Partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson. 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.