Lisa Brown is a Partner at WilmerHale. As a former general counsel of the US Department of Education (DOE) and vice president and general counsel of Georgetown University, she leverages nearly 40 years of legal experience in the public and private sectors to guide institutions of higher education and their boards through administrative compliance, government investigations, congressional inquiries and public scrutiny. She is a partner in the firm's Education Practice and Crisis Management and Strategic Response Group. During Ms. Brown’s tenure at the DOE, she oversaw a team of over 100 lawyers and provided legal advice to the secretary of education and senior DOE officials on issues relating to DOE initiatives, policies, regulations, litigation and business operations, including advising on public communications and responses to Congress.
As the vice president and general counsel at Georgetown University, Ms. Brown provided legal counsel to Georgetown’s president, board of directors, and senior academic and administrative officers on the panoply of issues facing the university, served in the President’s cabinet, and mentored first-generation college students and students interested in law and social justice.
Ms. Brown served in the Obama Administration, first as assistant to the president and staff secretary in the White House, and then as acting chief performance officer at the Office of Management and Budget. She was a member of the Obama-Biden transition team, serving as co-director of the Agency Review Working Group.
Ms. Brown was also the executive director of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, where she built the organization into a nationally recognized organization dedicated to furthering a progressive vision of law and policy.
During the Clinton Administration, Ms. Brown worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and then became counsel to Vice President Gore, where she also served as a member of the executive board of the President's Committee for Employment of People with Disabilities.
Prior to serving in the DOJ, she was a partner at another firm where she litigated cases in trial and appellate courts concerning legal malpractice, government and commercial contracts, banking, and labor law, and worked on a variety of corporate matters.
Ms. Brown was a law clerk for the Honorable John C. Godbold of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Frederick M. Lawrence is the 10th Secretary and CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the nation’s first and most prestigious honor society, founded in 1776. Lawrence is a Distinguished Lecturer at the Georgetown Law Center, and has previously served as president of Brandeis University, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, and Visiting Professor and Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018 and the American Law Institute in 1999.
An accomplished scholar, teacher and attorney, Lawrence is one of the nation’s leading experts on higher education law, civil rights, free expression and bias crimes. Lawrence has published widely and lectured internationally. He is the author of Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law (Harvard University Press 1999), examining bias-motivated violence and the laws governing how such violence is punished in the United States. Lawrence has testified before Congress concerning free expression on campus and on federal hate crime legislation. He frequently contributes op-eds to various news sources and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News among other networks.