Allen named vice chancellor and general counsel​

Succeeds Cannon, who is concluding 23-year tenure as general counsel

Monica Allen
Allen

Monica J. Allen, JD, associate vice chancellor, deputy general counsel and chief litigation counsel at Washington University in St. Louis, has been appointed vice chancellor and general counsel, announced Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. Her appointment is effective July 1, 2016.

Allen will succeed Michael R. Cannon, JD, who has announced that he will conclude his tenure June 30 as executive vice chancellor and general counsel after 23 years in the position. Cannon will continue full time with the university as professor of practice in Arts & Sciences and special assistant to the chancellor.

“Monica Allen is an accomplished legal professional recruited to Washington University by Michael Cannon about 10 years ago,” Wrighton said. “I am thrilled that we have in Monica a ‘job-ready’ person, with the experiences at Washington University and earlier in her legal career that prepare her for the role of vice chancellor and general counsel.

Michael Cannon
Cannon

“Michael Cannon’s contributions to our success as a university have been large in number and in consequence,” Wrighton said. “Personally, he has provided me wise and important counsel during my 20-plus years as chancellor, and he has provided me with the confidence needed to make the right decisions on numerous occasions and on a diverse set of issues.

“No one is smarter, and no one has been more dedicated to excellence,” Wrighton said. “He has a characteristic that I strongly embrace: He is attentive to every detail, large and small, in dealing with the many complex issues before us. He has built an outstanding team, and he has developed a well-deserved reputation as the best general counsel in U.S. higher education. I am proud to have had the opportunity to work closely with Michael and to learn from him.”

As vice chancellor and general counsel, Allen will serve as chief legal officer to the university’s Board of Trustees and chancellor and provide legal representation and counsel to all other academic and administrative components of the university, including the School of Medicine and its faculty practice plan. She will manage a legal department of 22, including 14 attorneys, and also oversee the claims-handling work of a risk management staff of nine.

Allen will report to Wrighton and be a member of the University Council, Washington University’s senior-most leadership team comprising academic leaders and managers of vital administrative areas.

“I am honored to have been selected to serve as Washington University’s vice chancellor and general counsel,” Allen said. “Michael Cannon has been an exemplary leader and has built a team of very talented attorneys. I am looking forward to working with Associate Vice Chancellor and Deputy General Counsel John Powers and the rest of the legal team to continue providing the highest quality legal support to the university’s many exciting initiatives.”

Allen, who holds three degrees from the university, joined the Office of Executive Vice Chancellor & General Counsel in 2006 as assistant vice chancellor and senior counsel.

She was promoted to associate vice chancellor, deputy general counsel and chief litigation counsel in 2008. She also served as acting general counsel from May through October of 2014 when Cannon was on sabbatical.

Allen earned a bachelor’s degree in 1980 and a master’s degree in 1985, both in comparative literature in Arts & Sciences, from the university.

She earned a juris doctoris from the School of Law in 1992, graduating second in her class of 223. A member of the Order of the Coif, she also served as primary articles editor for the Washington University Law Quarterly.

Allen clerked for the Honorable Jean C. Hamilton in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri from 1992-94, where she drafted district court opinions and bench memoranda and managed a court docket of approximately 250 cases.

That was followed by positions in St. Louis with the law firm Shands, Elbert, Gianoulakis & Giljum (1994-95) and the Federal Reserve Bank (1995-97), where she was responsible for litigation management, personnel issues, contract negotiation and providing guidance to the Department of Supervision and Regulation regarding banking laws and regulations.

In 1997, she joined Haar & Woods LLP as an associate before becoming partner in January 2002. Her focus there was on litigation, handling a wide array of commercial, regulatory, professional liability and employment matters.

From 2001-07, she also served as an adjunct professor in the School of Law, which awarded her its Distinguished Young Law Alumni Award in 2010.

According to Cannon, “Monica couples her extensive legal expertise and experience with deep wisdom and an unflappable temperament, all of which positions her well to serve the university with high distinction as its new general counsel for years to come.”

Leader in higher education

Cannon, also an Arts & Sciences graduate, came back to the university as its general counsel in 1993 after being in private practice 13 years at law firms in Washington, D.C., specializing in insurance contract litigation, counseling and negotiation.

He began his career as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division handling the investigation and prosecution of high-profile public official corruption cases.

Cannon earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in Arts & Sciences in 1973 from Washington University, where he was elected Phi Beta Kappa and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University.

After earning a graduate degree in politics from Oxford, he went on to Yale Law School, where he earned his juris doctoris in 1978.

According to Wrighton, Cannon has “consistently and impressively led his legal team for over two decades in providing counsel on a staggeringly broad range of associated legal issues,” including assuring compliance with all laws and regulations affecting education, health care and employment.

Under Cannon’s recommendation, the university implemented in 2000 what is believed to be the first voluntary university-wide compliance plan at an American university, becoming a national model.

In another case of successfully predicting national regulatory enforcement trends, Cannon launched a revision of the university’s protocols for responding to campus sexual assault allegations to expedite and professionalize those investigations, and did so before the issues surrounding such controversies became a matter of national attention and enforcement action.

Cannon and his team also successfully defended numerous lawsuits and established important legal precedents in areas affecting faculty research autonomy and clinical care.

In addition to his vast responsibilities handling the myriad complex legal issues facing a major research institution with an academic medical center, Cannon has held a wide range of other leadership roles during his tenure, including at one time overseeing the university’s human resources and environmental safety operations and chairing or serving on numerous executive-level search committees.

He founded and chaired for five years the university’s committee on postgraduate fellowships and scholarships, which identifies and mentors serious candidates for Rhodes, Marshall and other prestigious scholarships. He continues to provide one-on-one mentorship to several candidates each year.

Cannon, who was promoted to executive vice chancellor in 2000, created a post-graduate Fellowship in Higher Education and Health Law position in his office, providing top graduates from the university’s School of Law with a rare opportunity to work in a university legal office and receive extensive mentorship from an experienced legal team.

He helped launch collaborative academic programs between the university and IDC Herzliya in Israel, providing new study abroad opportunities for Washington University students.

As an adjunct professor in the law school, Cannon created and taught a course on insurance law and policy for 10 years.

This past fall, he taught an upper-level Arts & Sciences course on legal conflict in modern American society. He created the course to address what he saw as a need for undergraduates to have a baseline “legal literacy,” providing context for legal conflicts they read about or may encounter in their personal and professional lives.

Considered one of higher education’s leading general counsels in the United States, Cannon received the General Counsel of the Year Award from the St. Louis Business Journal in 2015. He also received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Arts & Sciences in 2011.

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