Steve Drown, who has served UC Davis as chief campus counsel for more than 16 years, is headed for Oakland to rejoin the UC Office of General Counsel.

Drown

Drown has been named UC’s new deputy general counsel for educational affairs and campus services. He will handle student and faculty issues and work in support of and in coordination with the 10 campus counsel offices in the UC system. Drown, who will report to General Counsel Charles Robinson, also will supervise the educational affairs and campus services unit. His last day on the Davis campus will be Feb. 1, and he will start in Oakland on April 1.

“Steve has been a valued counsel who has offered sage advice to our campus for more than 16 years,” Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi said. “His extensive on-campus experience will serve the UC system and each of its campuses well in the years to come. I look forward to working with Steve for many years to come.”

Before coming to UC Davis in September 1996, Drown had worked in the general counsel’s office as an environmental attorney for seven-and-a-half years.

His return to Oakland comes at a time when the chancellor has announced plans to reorganize the Office of the Campus Counsel and hire a new chief campus counsel. In a letter to the campus last month, Katehi wrote that she would be making changes to better accommodate evolving needs, including “additional expertise and experience in negotiating research and service agreements with a diverse business community (and) broader experience dealing with a variety of increasingly complex political entities.”

The chancellor’s primary goal with the reorganization is to reduce the campus’s overall legal expenditures.

“The fewer in-house counsel we have, the more we have to rely on more expensive outside counsel for legal transactions that could be handled internally at a much lower cost,” Katehi wrote in a Jan. 7 response to an open letter from Scott C. Shershow, chair of the Davis Faculty Association.

Under the chancellor’s original reorganization plan, a new chief campus counsel was to be hired. Drown was to continue to offer a wide range of legal advice in the new role of deputy campus counsel, where he was to focus on issues relating to the Davis campus.

In her letter to Shershow, the chancellor wrote that the addition of one new attorney position in the Office of the Campus Counsel “will more than pay for itself through the additional risk management services that will be provided to the campus.”

With Drown’s announced departure, the chancellor’s focus will be on recruiting the new chief campus counsel to join Senior Campus Counsel Mike Sweeney — who will serve as interim chief campus counsel after Drown steps down — and thus maintain today’s staffing level of two attorneys. For comparison, UC Berkeley and UCLA each have four attorneys in their main campus counsel offices.

Katehi pointed out that during the past 12 years the size of the Davis campus’s legal office has remained the same while the Davis campus population of students, staff and faculty has grown by more than 20 percent, with substantial growth in personnel matters, complaints and investigations. In addition, during the same period, research activity has increased dramatically, from $269 million in 2000 to $750 million in 2012, triggering a corresponding increase in research-related legal issues.

Looking forward, the chancellor said, it will be important to have the new chief campus counsel in place before she and other campus leaders reevaluate the campus’s legal services set-up, to take into account the new counsel’s experience and skill set.

The new chief counsel will report jointly to the chancellor and the general counsel in Oakland. A recruitment process has been initiated, and the recruitment committee comprises five representatives of UC Davis and five representatives of the Office of the General Counsel. The chancellor expects the national recruitment to conclude in late spring.

Read the chancellor's entire response to the open letter from the Davis Faculty Association.