Chambers USA, the leading annual guide to lawyers and law firms in the US, just named Meyestro founder Gina Maisto Smith, Chair of Cozen O’Connor’s Institutional Response Group, to its highest ranking in Higher Education for the third consecutive year. Here's what that honor actually means — and the three-part foundation it reveals for Meyestro.
Chambers weighs technical legal ability, professional conduct, client service, diligence, and commercial judgment, providing a full picture of how a lawyer performs. Band 1 is the highest ranking Chambers gives, and it's reserved for a small number of attorneys nationally in each specialty. In "Institutional Response," the practice of guiding institutions through complex, high-stakes matters involving sexual and gender-based misconduct, discrimination, and other conduct crises, one name sits at the top of that list in higher education for three years running: Gina Maisto Smith, Meyestro's founder.
But this isn't a post about the award. It’s about how Meyestro came into being to solve a critical gap in Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) for Higher Ed.
In 2006, Gina Maisto Smith set out to build something that didn't yet exist: a legal practice dedicated entirely to how institutions respond when complex human behavior collides with complex rules. The idea grew out of her nearly two decades in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, where she investigated and prosecuted sex crimes, child abuse, domestic violence, and homicide cases. She led more than 100 jury trials and trained fellow prosecutors and police in how to handle the most sensitive investigations.
It took five years before the concept of "Institutional Response" took hold. Then, in her words, her practice at Cozen O’Connor went from “sleepy to sleepless.”
What made it work wasn't legal expertise alone. It rested on three dimensions, in equal measure:
Gina’s three-dimensional foundation has guided more than 400 institutions over the last 20 years through their most consequential cases.
In doing that work, again and again, Gina found the same gap. What was missing wasn't judgment, but infrastructure.
In case after case, the problem was rarely malice or incompetence. It was a failure in capturing and accessing information to inform good judgment. It showed up when institutions couldn't "show their work" when it mattered most – to regulators, in litigation, or in the aftermath of a crisis. It appeared in poor data quality and uncoordinated activity across departments, or was hidden in opaque systems and digital junk drawers.
No solution existed to hold and integrate all three dimensions – legal rigor, human understanding, and institutional context – in one place, in real time, for sustained use. So Gina built one.
"After decades on the inside, I saw how care without infrastructure failed both people and the overarching mission of education. Meyestro helps institutions see risk, act responsibly, and demonstrate it." — Gina Maisto Smith, Founder, Meyestro
Meyestro is the first platform built specifically for people-centered governance, risk, and compliance in higher education.
Solving the problem was more than just “digitizing” it. It's about supporting people and the issues, decisions, and actions they face in managing reports, investigations, and crises.
Existing case management tools, enterprise compliance systems, and static risk registers simply weren't built to manage this intersection of complex rules and complex human behavior.
Only Meyestro provides such context – forged by the crucible of experience working with university leadership, general counsel and compliance offices, department heads and frontline staff. (This is what we mean when we say Meyestro is uniquely designed “for higher ed, by higher ed experts.”)
Meyestro provides an operational solution for matters that had no operational home, making information accessible, precise, and synchronized.
The current environment drives an urgent need for change, given the volatile social and political climate, reduced enrollments, a rise in cases, overburdened staff, and significant budget cuts at every university. Concurrently, federal funding has been cut dramatically, often tied to compliance (or non compliance) with federal regulations.
The risks of status quo show up in legal exposure, regulatory actions, access to funding, and institutional reputation.
The costs are real in resources and budgets to manage, and in legal judgments and fees to evaluate and litigate cases. Consider:
The consequences are rarely tied to one factor. They come from the absence of a system that collects and connects the dots before a regulator has to.
Effective governance takes data rigor, operational consistency, and informed judgment to identify and address institutional risk and protect the people it serves. It's not a budget-line item owned by any one department or office. It's an institution-wide requirement and responsibility. Meyestro delivers that capability – an approach that starts with systems thinking and a solution that bridges silos.
Meyestro is already proven in practice today. Teams and leaders focus on actions and decisions instead of reconciling information gaps and inconsistencies. Clery reporting that once took months now takes minutes.Universities see lower investigative costs and reduced legal fees and exposure. Risk patterns that once went undetected surface in time for intervention – and prevention.
One customer facing a fast-moving, nationally-scrutinized crisis reformed its practices and replaced digital silos with Meyestro as its centralized source of reliable information, ultimately becoming a 2026 finalist for a national Compliance Program of the Year award.
Fundamentally, institutions using Meyestro gain the ability to demonstrate effective governance to regulators, to leadership, and to the communities they serve. That law, care, and institutional judgment are working together, not in tension.
The Chambers ranking reflects the expert insights that make Meyestro possible: a responsive, people-centric GRC platform built on decades of experience, proven in practice, and now available to every institution.
Contact us to learn how Meyestro is supporting leading universities today.