Practices

Education

Why Cooley

For 30+ years, Cooley lawyers have been providing comprehensive legal services and counsel to the education industry. With the largest practice devoted exclusively to this sector, Cooley lawyers and professionals combine an exceptional depth of knowledge, with extensive experience in the many substantive areas that characterize contemporary education. Our clients include every kind of postsecondary institution, as well as higher education organizations, accreditors, investors, lenders, and businesses that support and finance the postsecondary community. Our multidisciplinary team provides sophisticated legal representation that enables our postsecondary education clients to seize new opportunities and successfully meet the challenges of a constantly changing business, regulatory and technological landscape. 

Areas of Practice

Federal Student Aid Funds

  • Advise on the complexities of securing and keeping federal funding for student financial aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965

Accreditation and State Licensure

  • Work with state agencies that authorize postsecondary institutions, accrediting agencies that oversee their quality and state licensure boards that qualify their graduates
  • Advise on licensure and authorization of educational services delivered across state and national borders via online learning

Commercial Contracts and Procurement

  • Prepare and negotiate complex technology-based agreements, including hardware procurement, software licenses, professional services and software development agreements, outsourcing agreements, application service provider agreements and telecommunication capacity and service agreements

Distance Learning

For‐Profit and Nonprofit Taxation

  • Counsel postsecondary clients on all areas of corporate, partnership, trust and individual federal and state income taxation, gift taxation, sales and use taxation, employment taxation, the taxation of nonprofit entities, and the taxation of foreign entities and business activities

Human Resources

  • Counsel clients on the design and operation of qualified, nonqualified and incentive alternative compensation and stock-based programs plans for employees, as well as retirement and healthcare programs and executive employment contracts

Intellectual Property

  • Represent clients on matters ranging from the protection, acquisition, licensing and use of intellectual property to counseling and negotiations on matters affecting virtually every kind of new media and alternative technology
  • Advise on all aspects of copyright law, from fair use analyses to advice on compulsory licensing schemes

Legislation

  • Provide companies with the policy insight to make informed business decisions
  • Monitor federal public policies and procedures and analyze legislation related to education
  • Identify meaningful patterns in the legislative and regulatory processes that are likely to impact our clients' business interests

Litigation and Administrative Appeals

  • Represent postsecondary entities in a wide range of controversies in federal and state courts, and before the Department of Education, including negotiating settlement agreements and representing institutions in proceedings before administrative tribunals
  • Defend against qui tam actions – an especially complex and potentially very disruptive process that is increasingly being used against postsecondary institutions, particularly with regard to their use of federal student aid funds

Privacy

  • Assist clients in safely navigating student data privacy issues at the federal, state and international levels

Transactions, Mergers and Acquisitions

  • Advise clients on all aspects of strategic transactions, including public and private offerings, financings, debt and equity offerings, mergers and acquisitions
  • Guide postsecondary clients through complex negotiations, multilevel financings and all other phases of major transactions
  • Work with clients to design structures that are most likely to pass approval process and minimize regulatory limitations 

Representative Matters

  • US regulatory and UK counsel to The Vistria Group and Apollo Global Management on their $1.1 billion acquisition of Apollo Education Group
  • Hong-Kong based Nord Anglia Education in its acquisition of a portfolio of six schools from Meritas for $575 million
  • Education Corporation of America in its acquisition of all 38 campuses from Kaplan College
  • 2U, a leading provider of cloud-based software-as-a-service solutions that enable leading nonprofit colleges and universities to deliver high quality education to qualified students, anywhere, on its $119.3 million initial public offering
  • The Minerva Project in connection with the establishment of a strategic partnership to develop innovative online-based higher education programs
  • A Massachusetts trade association of career schools in its Constitutional, regulatory and administrative challenge to certain regulations promulgated by the Commonwealth's Attorney General. The court dismissed two of the key regulations related to how for-profit colleges informed students about the transferability of credits and how they described or advertised the time it could take to finish their programs.
  • The Estate of Decker College in a dispute concerning scope of statutory penalties imposed by Department of Education under Title IV of the Higher Education Act for alleged failure to make certain disclosures. A federal administrative judge relieved Decker College of the $31 million liability.