Chesley's professional formation took place in Boston, a city with a long tradition of corporate and nonprofit legal practice. He studied as an undergraduate at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then took his law degree at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston before entering practice in 1985.
Chesley received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College in 1978, graduating magna cum laude. Harvard College, the undergraduate college of Harvard University, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, founded in 1636 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
He then attended Northeastern University School of Law, where he received a Juris Doctor in 1984. The law school traces its origins to 1898, when the Boston Young Men's Christian Association offered evening legal courses for working people who could not attend the day programs at Harvard and Boston universities. The program was incorporated in 1904 with the power to grant the Bachelor of Laws degree, and after a period of closure it was revived on the basis of Northeastern's cooperative education model, which alternates academic study with periods of practical work.
Chesley was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1985, and he later gained admission to practice in California in 2003.
Chesley's principal professional affiliation has been with Ropes & Gray, a law firm founded in Boston in 1865 by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray, both Harvard Law graduates. The firm developed bankruptcy, labor, and securities practices during the twentieth century and had grown to nearly 75 attorneys by the 1960s. Chesley has been a member of the firm's health care practice since 1985 and is a partner there.
His practice combines transactional work with tax-exempt organizational law, health care regulatory and reimbursement questions, and securities disclosure. Beginning with the wave of bond issuances that preceded the Tax Reform Act of 1985, he took part in tax-exempt financings as borrower's counsel, bond counsel, underwriter's counsel, and investor's counsel. Such financings allow nonprofit hospitals, universities, and other 501(c)(3) organizations to borrow at tax-exempt rates, and his transactions have included high-yield unrated debt as well as AAA-rated bond issues for two major private universities.
Chesley has served as lead transaction counsel in nonprofit mergers and affiliations, including a provider-insurer affiliation that the trade and business press called a 'game changer.' He has also acted as outside general counsel to a health care system, advised a leading university on capital finance matters, and counseled boards on governance.
In the early 1990s he was a founding member of the board of directors of a state trade association in the assisted living industry. That association asked him to draft legislation, which became the Massachusetts Assisted Living Act of 1994, establishing a framework that allowed flexible approaches to helping older residents remain in place rather than applying conventional health care rules.
Drafted the legislation that became the Massachusetts Assisted Living Act of 1994, at the request of a state trade association in the assisted living industry whose board he had helped found.
Served as lead transaction counsel in nonprofit mergers and affiliations, including a major provider-insurer affiliation that trade and business publications described as a 'game changer' for the health care sector.
Took part in tax-exempt financings in California, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, ranging from high-yield unrated debt to AAA-rated bond issues for two major private universities.
(Co-authored with Ropes & Gray colleagues Michael Lampert ...)
2017
Chesley is a member of the American Health Lawyers Association, a national professional association of attorneys who advise on health care law, including regulatory, transactional, and reimbursement matters. He is also associated with the National Association of Bond Lawyers, an organization of attorneys who practice in public finance and bond law, the field in which his tax-exempt financing work is situated.
He was a member of the Health Care Committee of the State Bar of California, a committee of the state's mandatory bar association that addresses health care legal issues. He served as vice chair of education and later as co-chair of that committee.
