Hailey Mullican had a life-changing moment in the 10th grade at Winston Churchill High School in San Antonio.
Her U.S. Government teacher had the class read the Declaration of Independence.
“I remember being deeply moved. I had read it before then, but at that time the courage, audacity and hope of those authors created a bit of an existential crisis for me,” Mullican said. “Did the [signers] really mean all that? Did anyone still believe that? Could those declarations really be real? Did I have a role to play?”
“I wanted justice and fairness to be achieved and then protected,” she said. “I wasn’t totally sure what that meant or how to do it, but I figured if the authors of the Declaration were lawyers, then law school was perhaps a place for me to start. Like many other things in my life, I felt like I knew what I wanted in the end, even if I wasn’t exactly sure how to get there.”
Mullican has definitely figured it out.
She is now the chief legal officer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where this past year she led a historic merger with UTSA and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, which would be a multibillion-dollar M&A transaction in the corporate world. The merger officially closed on Sept. 1, creating the third-largest public research university in Texas and is expected to generate $7 billion in economic impact for San Antonio.
“The merger is one of the most important decision the Board of Regents have made in the last 50 years,” Mullican told The Texas Lawbook. “The integration of two powerhouse institutions to create a single, comprehensive and first-class institution means that more lives will be positively impacted by our work. More people will have jobs, more patients will be healed, more discoveries will transform lives and more students will change the course of not just their own lives, but the lives of their children and families for generations to come.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s San Antonio Chapter and The Lawbook are awarding the 2025 San Antonio Corporate Counsel Award for M&A Transaction of the Year to Mullican and her legal team at UT San Antonio.
Mullican and her team will be honored on Nov. 6, along with 11 other San Antonio general counsel, at the inaugural San Antonio Corporate Awards.
Premium Subscriber Q&A: Mullican discusses the pressure and honor of stewarding the state of Texas’ and taxpayers’ money in selecting outside counsel.
“Nothing epitomizes a transaction with truly national and local impact more than this historic merger of these two premier San Antonio organizations,” said Vericast Chief Compliance Officer Shelayne Clemmer, who nominated Mullican for the award. “The UT San Antonio merger stands as a landmark achievement in higher education, embodying strategic vision, operational excellence and transformative impact.”
“Although the merger’s stated goals — enhancing student access, expanding research opportunities and achieving academic accreditation — appeared straightforward, the magnitude and complexity of the endeavor were truly without precedent, with few models or experts to guide the process,” Clemmer said. “The Board of Regents expected completion by 2025, which increased every decision’s urgency. The merger presented legal, operational and cultural issues, requiring expert analysis, development and implementation. Specifically, navigating the statutory authority of each entity required careful legal and administrative coordination.”
By all accounts, the landmark merger was successful because of Mullican’s leadership.
Dr. Mahdi Malekpour Ghorbani, Hailey Mullican, Dr. Woodson Scott Jones
“Hailey has great attention to detail, advocates zealously for her client and has applies common sense to difficult legal issues,” said King & Spalding partner Adam Robison. “I think Hailey’s strengths as a GC are her foresight, organization and keen understanding of her client’s business and legal objectives. Hailey is also very aware of budget and does a good job of balancing between work that can be done by in-house counsel and external counsel.”
Norton Rose Fulbright partner Jeff Wurzburg said Mullican is a “servant leader committed to ensuring the success of everyone in her legal department.”
“Hailey’s command of the substantive legal issues, intricate operational knowledge and genuine concern for the best interests of her client make her an exceptional lawyer and an even better leader,” Wurzburg said. “Hailey’s extraordinary commitment to her client’s mission and ability to distill complex legal considerations into tangible strategic legal advice leads to beneficial outcomes that ripple far beyond her client and positively impact the entire community served by UT Health. I have seen firsthand how her drive for excellence results in positive outcomes for her client and our city.”
Hailey Mullican, The Early Years
Born and raised in San Antonio, Mullican has a family history in law and medicine. Her father was an old-fashioned family doctor who practiced his craft for five decades. Her mother taught high school at John Jay High School but stayed home to run the household when her children were young. Her mom went on to earn a Ph.D from Texas A&M in Educational Human Resource Development and then served as an educational counselor at San Antonio College and later as a licensed professional counselor in private practice.
Her aunt was a 1969 graduate of SMU Law School and served as a public defender in Dallas for many years. Her older brother, Jeremy Martin, has an appellate and litigation support practice in Irving.
“But I think my parents influenced my decision [to be a lawyer] more than anything else,” she said. “Both were committed to performing acts of social justice, whether through their efforts to improve and expand healthcare for all or in helping someone with few resources navigate the complex environment of higher education. They saw healthcare and education as fundamental and precious rights and instilled in me a passion for both.”
During the summer of 2001, Mullican’s junior year at Abilene Christian University, she served as a legislative intern for six weeks for Congressman Lamar Smith.
“It was an idyllic summer just before the September 11 attacks rocked and forever changed our country,” she said. “I learned how hard those public servants worked, how much was expected of them and how little most people appreciated about the work they accomplished. Consequently, I decided not to pursue a career in politics,” she said with a smile.
After earning her law degree in 2007 at St. Mary’s University School of Law, Mullican practiced general civil litigation for two years at Ihfe & Associates in San Antonio.
‘No Day is Ever What I Expected’
In 2009, UT Health hired her as a staff attorney to handle health law matters.
“My father and husband are physicians, and I admire their intelligence and selflessness,” she said. “Being able to provide legal support for similarly situated people was very satisfying.”
Mullican’s father and her husband graduated from the Long School of Medicine at UT Health, and Mullican has many friends who graduated from other programs at UT Health and UTSA.
“So many people in my life are, and have been, impacted by the training, care and discovery that occurs at UT San Antonio, so I am acutely aware of the real-world impact this institution has on the daily lives of people around me,” she said. “I could not imagine a client with a more perfect purpose and mission than UT San Antonio.”
Top: Jason Pirruccello, Sadie Ballesteros, Cara Bennett, Terii Lopez, Hailey Mullican, Kris Kwolek
Bottom: Laurie James, Virginia Galloway, Kathleen Blanton, Sarah Pryor, Christi Salazar, Corina Castillo-Johnson (Not pictured: Erica Valladares and Natalee Bryan-Marion)
With a team of seven lawyers and seven paralegals, Mullican and her team handle a plethora of legal and compliance issues daily, ranging from drafting athletic coaching contracts and advising on personnel workforce disputes to researching obscure healthcare regulations regarding disclosures and advising hearing officers in student matters.
“No day is ever what I expected, and I learn something new every day,” Mullican said. “Higher education and academic medicine are some of the wildest, most inspiring and most complex environments. The best days are the days I get to interface with students and faculty and reconnect with the excitement and hope about all the things we accomplish.”
‘No One Knew How to Do This.’
The merger of UTSA and UT Health first landed on Mullican’s desk in the early summer 2024. The UTSA Board of Regents directed University President Taylor Eighmy to begin merger activities in August of 2024. A significant portion of the work to make it a reality fell to Mullican and the team.
“We felt big-time pressure but not fear,” she said. “We saw that the merger presented opportunity, which we interpreted as equal parts challenge and hope.”
Mullican said the team’s first issue was to “examine the statutory construction of the two legal entities to understand the constitutional authority — as agencies of the state of Texas — and scope for alignment.” She said the team needed to consider the “potential for maximization of opportunities for both the general academic mission, as well as the clinical and research missions.”
“For example, the clinical practice would be the revenue-generating engine for the combined institution, but its operations — such as Medicare and Medicaid enrollment, payor contracts, state licensure and registration — were under the UT Health San Antonio tax ID,” she said. “Could we ‘merge’ but leave those vital and valuable arrangements in place without disruption?”
Mullican said she and her team examined the merger process and the expertise that would be needed to determine whether or not to hire outside counsel.
“Pretty quickly, the team realized that no one really knew how to do this. And I mean no one,” she said. “While academic programs had merged in other contexts, and healthcare entities merge frequently, we had no real model for an entity trying to do both at the same time. We obtained all of the on-point guidance available, but we still lacked a roadmap or recipe to sequentially follow to ensure our success.”
“From my perspective, I couldn’t justify spending taxpayer dollars to pay some other lawyer to figure out how to do it on my behalf,” she said. “As stewards of public funds, the entire team believed it was better to dig in and dig deep to create the destiny and vision President Eighmy articulated.”
Mullican said some of the biggest challenges were “pacing and communication.”
“Sometimes you may know the answer to the question, but the value in pacing the process is sometimes as important as the conclusion itself,” she said. “Large mergers involve evolution of culture and change management that can create insecurity in even some of the most secure leaders. Risk and harm from that insecurity are mitigated when team members are given time and space to ideate, strategize and align on the best path forward.”
“Communication was a challenge, because at its core, this merger’s priority was not to eliminate redundancies and improving efficiencies, but rather to grow and expand capabilities,” she said. “We often talked about how our entities could combine to be something even bigger and better than what they were on their own.”
As the merger moved forward, Eighmy identified crucial offices or positions that he felt were necessary to ensure the merger’s success. One of the first was the chief legal officer. And Mullican was his choice.
“When he asked me to serve as CLO and manage the combined legal office, I was humbled and thrilled,” Mullican said. “With a great deal of candor, we both recognized that neither of us knew exactly how to merge and manage a combined legal office, but we trusted that we knew where we would end up and that we would get there together.”
In nominating Mullican and her legal team, Clemmer pointed out that the other legal work for UTSA lawyers didn’t stop.
“All merger activity occurred while the institutions continued to provide their traditional offerings and implement the previously planned or anticipated new clinical and academic offerings,” she said. “These included opening their first and only Multispecialty and Research Hospital and the College of Artificial Intelligence. They also had to adapt to unanticipated challenges, including monitoring state legislative changes.”
Wurzburg, the Norton Rose Fulbright partner, said Mullican’s success with such a huge merger can be attributed to her being a “genuine and passionate leader that sets the standard for servant leadership.”
“Hailey’s commitment to her craft makes everyone around her better, resulting in positive outcomes for her client and colleagues,” he said. “The merger of UT Health and UTSA will positively impact San Antonio and surrounding communities in immeasurable ways for years to come. It is a transformative change that places UT Health San Antonio alongside some of the most renowned institutions in the country and adds luster to the already exceptional San Antonio healthcare and biotech community.”
Ross Fischer, a lawyer who has worked with Mullican over the years, said there “are plenty of GCs who specialize in either health law or education law, but Hailey is an expert in each of these complicated legal fields.”
“Hailey believes deeply in the mission of UT San Antonio and will be focused on furthering that mission through a period of transformation in higher education,” Fischer said. “Coming from a family of doctors, Hailey believes in her client’s mission. It also helps her understand her client’s motivations, intentions and goals. The result is a general counsel who has a synergistic relationship with her client. She works to ensure that her legal team has a full understanding of their client, its motives and goals.”
Fun Facts: Hailey Mullican
- Favorite book: I don’t know that I have a favorite, but I’m certain I’m never more obnoxious than when reading David Sedaris on a plane. Me Talk Pretty One Day had me in tears on a flight back from Dallas. And even though I kept putting the book down to try to get my laughter under control, once I started reading again, I was hopeless.
- Favorite movie: I prefer scary movies and never pass up a chance to rewatch Poltergeist.
- Favorite vacation: Uvita, Costa Rica
- Favorite restaurant: El Jarro de Arturo. So many meals, memories and margaritas. If only I could convince them to bring back their Sunday brunch.
- Hero in life: I hit the jackpot in the family department. From parents and siblings, to husband, sons, in-laws and cousins, I am the luckiest woman I know.