Dina L. Michels is an American lawyer whose career has combined private law practice with executive legal leadership in medicine. She was a partner at the Boston-based firm Ropes & Gray before joining the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 2006, where she later became chief legal officer and executive vice president.
Background
Michels's documented path began with undergraduate study at Harvard University, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States, and continued with legal training in Washington, D.C. The capital's concentration of federal institutions gave her legal education a setting close to government and the courts, a environment that shaped many legal careers of the period.
Her later professional life developed in two main settings: a large Boston-origin corporate law firm during the late 1980s and 1990s, and a national medical society from the mid-2000s onward. Both settings placed legal work at the center of institutional and regulatory matters.
Education
Michels earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 1983, with a concentration in history and literature. Harvard College, founded in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, and its liberal arts curriculum combined historical and literary study with broad undergraduate training.
She received a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center in 1987, graduating with honors. The law school traces its origins to 1870, when Georgetown University's directors recommended a separate department to train lawyers, and it was the first law school established in the United States by a Jesuit institution. Its location on Capitol Hill, close to the U.S. Capitol, gave it a strong association with national politics, government, and international law.
At Georgetown she served as an editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. Law reviews of this kind are student-edited scholarly journals in which students select, edit, and check articles for publication, and this editorial role formed part of her law school experience.
Career
Michels began her professional legal career in 1987, the year she received her law degree, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar that year. She was later admitted in the District of Columbia in 1990 and in Maryland in 1992.
From 1987 to 2006 she was a partner at Ropes & Gray, a firm founded in Boston in 1865 by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray, both Harvard Law graduates. By the 1960s the firm had grown to nearly 75 attorneys, and it had developed bankruptcy, labor, and securities practices in the decades before Michels joined. At Ropes & Gray she worked in the Corporate Department and the Health Care Group, and she anchored the firm's mid-Atlantic health care practice, representing academic medical institutions and hospitals in corporate and regulatory matters.
In 2006 Michels joined the American Society of Clinical Oncology as senior vice president and chief legal officer. ASCO was founded in 1964 and represents nearly 45,000 oncology professionals who care for people living with cancer. In that role she served as the organization's general counsel and as a member of its executive leadership team. She later led ASCO's Center for Integrity and Law, which encompasses legal, governance, ethics, and compliance activities.
From 2021 she has served as the society's chief operating officer, chief legal officer, and executive vice president. The combined role linked operational management with the legal, governance, and compliance functions that she had already directed at ASCO.
Membership
Michels is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies. The council was founded in 1965 with the goal of improving the quality of care delivered in the United States. Today it is a coalition of about 50 specialty societies representing more than 800,000 physicians, working through convening, collaboration, and collective action across medical specialties.
