Lauren Koster

Lauren is a New York City-based attorney who represents multijurisdictional tax-exempt entities (public charities, private foundations, and social welfare organizations) as their outside general counsel and leads the firm's charter and independent school practice. She advises clients on a wide range of matters, from entity formation and governance through employment, compliance, and grantmaking. She manages direct representation and systemic legal advocacy on behalf of charter schools and charter management organizations, and has prevailed in administrative appeals before the Connecticut State Department of Education and Connecticut Superior Court and is actively pursuing an appeal in the Connecticut Appellate Court.

Throughout her legal career, Lauren has merged interests across litigation and transactional practice in service of the public good. She clerked in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire and for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. She served as a Rappaport Fellow for Law & Public Policy at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education in the Office of General Counsel and as a Skadden Fellow, prior to that law firm's capitulation to the Trump Administration. As a Skadden Fellow, she proudly represented children as a court-appointed advocate in juvenile court and child welfare matters.

Lauren is also a former educator, which informs her work with charter and independent schools: she knows, not abstractly, what is at stake when a school's authorization or funding is challenged.