Jennifer Hutchens

Practice Areas

Jennifer Csik Hutchens, partner in Dechert’s corporate practice, leads the firm’s healthcare regulatory practice and is a leader for multi-disciplinary healthcare and life sciences initiatives. Ms. Hutchens is a leading, globally recognized counselor and trusted advisor in healthcare law. She brings broad industry and regulated experience, for a diverse range of clients, across the spectrum of their legal needs — from structuring and efficiently closing sophisticated transactions to achieving compliance with operational and risk management intricacies.

A skilled and versatile corporate lawyer, Ms. Hutchens excels in providing commercially practical and responsive counsel to strategic entities, institutional investors, private equity-backed healthcare funds, portfolio companies and roll-up networks. Around the country, hospitals, academic medical centers, clinical research groups, ancillary service providers, non-profits, management services organizations and medical device companies also call on Ms. Hutchens for her acute understanding of how to implement and execute on their healthcare business objectives.

Her nearly two-decade transactional practice focuses on joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and other collaboration transactions, having structured, successfully negotiated, and closed hundreds of healthcare transactions. Ms. Hutchens is a frequent national lecturer on effective healthcare transactions and negotiations.

Clients also frequently look to Ms. Hutchens for solutions to their most critical healthcare contracting arrangements — from professional services, to managed care and value-based care. She manages her clients’ significant healthcare contracting portfolios. Ms. Hutchens has served as her clients’ one-stop-shop for comprehensive contracting coverage, negotiating and interpreting managed care and participation agreements, navigating risk- and value-based reimbursement methodologies and addressing related compliance and technical considerations. She also has notable experience with CMS innovation models, such as the Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access and Community Health (ACO REACH) Model.

Ms. Hutchens also often directly works with boards of directors and senior management teams on corporate structure, governance and pre-litigation matters at the most critical intersections of the evolving area of healthcare law and regulation. She has extensive experience interpreting federal and state healthcare guidance, including the Anti-Kickback and Stark laws, corporate practice of medicine and fee-splitting prohibitions, federal Physician Sunshine Transparency Act, surprise/balance billing laws and price transparency rules.

Having previously held a global leadership role at an international law firm, Ms. Hutchens is highly sought after for her US regulated expertise in the healthcare sector. She leverages this expertise to help global ventures, particularly in the R&D space, commercialize their developments within US reimbursement models. She is a member of the firm’s Israeli client team, and regularly works to support clients in collaboration with the firm's EMEA offices.

Ms. Hutchens is at the forefront of advising on cutting-edge areas in healthcare, life sciences and privacy/HIPAA, specifically FemTech, behavioral health and digital transformation. In particular, she advises clients on implementing novel, first-of-their-kind solutions on matters relating to health innovation, including artificial intelligence (AI), telehealth and concierge medicine. Ms. Hutchens also aids companies — including retailers — in pivoting into the healthcare and life sciences industries for the first time, delivering strategic and innovative solutions.

Ms. Hutchens is passionate about community connection and mental health. She serves on the Board of Directors of Alexander Youth Network, the largest provider of mental health services for children in the state of North Carolina.