NYU President John Sexton today named Bonnie Brier as Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary to the Board of Trustees. Ms. Brier is currently General Counsel and Assistant Secretary to the Boards of The Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia and The Childrens Hospital Foundation. Her duties will include overseeing the all of the Universitys legal operations, including the Medical Center and its affiliates; her appointment at NYU is effective as of August 2009.
John Sexton said, An institution of our stature, our span and size, our complexity and diversity, and our energy requires a chief counsel of the highest caliber, and in Bonnie Brier we have found just a person. A leader in the organized bar, an important member of the senior management of a healthcare institution renowned for its excellence, a lecturer in the law, and a working attorney who has written extensively about her field, she will bring to NYU those qualities we prize so highly: experience, wisdom, intelligence, and a sense of dedication.
Terry Nolan, our esteemed colleague who has served as Acting General Counsel since August 2007, is an NYU citizen of exceptional dedication whose great skill and discretion as a lawyer are well known and widely respected. We are very grateful to him for having served as Acting General Counsel, and we are grateful, too, to Leona Chamberlin, who has been Acting Secretary.
Ms. Brier has been the General Counsel for The Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia since 1990; she was the institutions first in-house counsel. Prior to that, she was a partner at Ballard, Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll, specializing in colleges and universities, hospitals, and other nonprofit organizations; she joined the firm in 1979. She was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1977-1979. She was a law clerk to Chief Judge Joseph Lord of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 1976-1977.
She is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Associations Tax Section, its Health Law Section, and its Coordinating Committee on Nonprofit Governance, among many other professional societies. She serves as a member of the IRS Advisory Committee on Tax Exempt and Government Entities. In 2006, she was named one of the 50 Most Influential In-House Counsels in North America, and she received the Nonprofit Lawyers Award from the ABAs Section of Business Law Committee on Nonprofit Corporations, among other awards and honors. And she is an author and frequent lecturer on issues related to nonprofit hospitals, tax-exempt organizations, good governance practices by nonprofit organizations and risk management.
She received her A.B. from Cornell University magna cum laude, and her J.D. from Stanford University, where she was a member of the Order of the Coif and an editor of the Law Review.