Total contributions: $49,934
Total spent: $14,730. Most of his spending has gone toward advertising.
Education: B.S., Cornell University, 1999; international law studies, Esade, 2003; J.D., Cornell Law School, 2004
CU connections: Lalchandani grew up in Boulder and returned in 2019. Several family members have attended CU, including a brother and sister who are alumni and a niece who is currently enrolled.
Job: Partner at Lalchandani Simon PL, a law firm representing health care, technology and hospitality companies. He is also co-founder of Treeline Veterinary Cancer Care with his partner, Karen Oberthaler.
Endorsements: Boulder Progressives; U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna of California; CU Regent Wanda James; Boulder County Commissioner Marta Loachamin; Boulder City Councilmember Rob Kaplan; state Sens. Dylan Roberts and Cathy Kipp; state Rep. Yara Zokaie; Boulder Planning Board Chair Jorge Boone; and Carlos Alvarez-Aranyos, founder of American Opposition, which helped organize the No Kings protests. Read the full list.
Questionnaire
1) What is your personal connection to CU, why are you interested in serving on the Board of Regents, and what sets you apart from the other candidates in this race?
CU is my hometown university. My family moved to Boulder in 1979. CU educated my siblings, relatives and even emigrant family members from India because of our Boulder roots. I’ve taken classes myself. Two reasons I want to serve as Regent include: 1) as a technology attorney, I see AI threatening CU’s promise, and 2) minorities are not adequately represented on the Board. What sets me apart is simple: a Regent’s duties are approving budgets, hiring and firing personnel, and shaping policy. I am the only candidate who manages budgets, makes hiring decisions, and advises organizations on long-term strategy professionally.
2) Before running for regent, what have you done to support, strengthen or invest in public education?
Public education is personal to me. It is the foundation that prepared me to earn two degrees from Cornell University. I have worked to help foster care youth navigate the system to access college and a better life. But the most meaningful thing I’ve done is hiring from public universities, including CU, and actively encouraging my clients to do the same. When employers choose public university graduates, they validate the investment students and families make, strengthen those institutions’ reputations, and create the economic outcomes that make public higher education worth pursuing in the first place.
3) Regents are responsible for major policy, governance and budget decisions across the university system. What experience do you have making high-level organizational or financial decisions?
As an attorney advising large organizations, I am immersed daily in exactly the decisions the Board of Regents faces. I counsel clients on strategy, complex budgeting, governance, labor relations, litigation and public relations. When a major organization faces a difficult financial decision, a leadership transition, a policy challenge or a reputational crisis, I am the person in the room helping navigate it. I also own small businesses and manage their budgets with real people’s livelihoods on the line. No other candidate has had to sleep at night with these responsibilities. This is what I do for a living.
4) Do you support collective bargaining rights for university employees, and would you vote in favor of them if they came before the board? Why or why not?
Yes, I support collective bargaining rights for university employees, and I would vote in favor of them if the question came before the Board of Regents.
Faculty, staff and student workers are the backbone of the University of Colorado. They deliver the education, conduct the research, and provide the services that define CU’s reputation and mission. It is only right that they have a meaningful say in the conditions under which they work.
Collective bargaining is not just about wages. It is about creating a structured, respectful process through which employees can raise concerns, propose solutions and participate in shaping their workplace. That kind of engagement reduces turnover, which is costly to any large organization. It attracts top talent who want to work somewhere that values their voice. And it allows the university to actually practice the values it publicly espouses around equity, inclusion and shared governance.
A university that preaches democratic values and critical thinking should model those principles in how it treats its own people. Supporting collective bargaining is not a radical position. It is a practical and principled one. As a Regent, I would be proud to cast that vote and stand behind it.
5) Would you support CU joining the proposed statewide defense compact against federal threats to academic freedom and university funding, as proposed by the Boulder Faculty Assembly? Why or why not?
Yes, I would support CU joining the statewide defense compact. As a litigator, I understand that no single strategy wins every fight. The strength of any defense lies in having multiple weapons and the ability to deploy them as circumstances demand. A statewide compact does exactly that. It expands our options, diversifies risk, and creates collective leverage that no single institution possesses alone.
Federal threats to academic freedom and funding are not hypothetical. They are happening and they carry real consequences for research, faculty recruitment, student access, and the financial health of the University. Standing alone against those pressures puts CU at a disadvantage. Standing together with peer institutions changes the calculus entirely.
I am the only candidate who has actually appeared in court, drafted a complaint, mapped out a litigation strategy and seen it through. I know what it takes to build a case, sustain it under pressure and win. That experience is not incidental to this question. It is directly relevant to how CU should approach an increasingly hostile federal environment. Joining this compact is a strategic decision, not a political one. It is the kind of decisive, informed leadership the Board of Regents needs right now.
6) In recent months, protesters have urged the CU Regents to end CU Boulder’s contract with Key Lime Air because of the company’s contracts with ICE to transport detainees. Would you support the regents ending that contract? Why or why not?
Yes, I would support ending CU’s contract with Key Lime Air. I want to be direct about where I am coming from. As the only minority candidate in this race, I see this issue differently than my opponents. I cannot reduce it to a routine operational matter that falls outside the Regents’ purview. This is about values. It is about morals. It is about whether the University of Colorado stands behind the communities from which it actively recruits.
You cannot simultaneously conduct outreach to minority students, promise them belonging and opportunity, and then write checks to a vendor whose contracts support the deportation of vulnerable people from those same communities. That is not a policy tension. That is hypocrisy. Across the CU system, more than a third of students are minorities. Every day that contract remains in place, the University sends those students a message about how much their presence is truly valued. And it also makes clear what is lacking in leadership. That message undermines everything CU claims to stand for around inclusion and equity.
7) How would you balance concerns about campus safety, harassment and hate speech with protections for free expression and political protest, and what role should the Board of Regents play in those decisions?
Free expression is not a peripheral feature of university life. It is a foundational pillar. Students should be able to protest, challenge authority, advocate for unpopular positions, and make their voices heard without fear of punishment. That is what a university is for. As a Regent, I would fiercely protect that right.
But the law is clear, and so am I. Freedom of expression does not include the freedom to make others unsafe, to harass individuals, or to deny fellow students the ability to learn, participate, and enjoy their college experience. The line is not drawn at discomfort or disagreement. It is drawn where one person’s expression begins to violate another person’s rights.
The Board of Regents has a responsibility to establish clear, principled policies that reflect both of those truths simultaneously. Not one at the expense of the other. Those policies should be developed transparently, applied consistently regardless of viewpoint, and grounded in both constitutional law and the University’s core values.
What students deserve is a campus where they can speak boldly and live safely. Those goals are not in conflict. With the right framework and the right leadership, they reinforce each other.
8) University leadership and the regents recently faced criticism over a $2 million partnership with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT access to students and staff. The board is now considering a broader AI policy framework. In your view, what should be the principles or priorities guiding CU’s approach to artificial intelligence?
AI is a tool. Like any tool, its value depends on how thoughtfully it is taught and used. The debate around CU’s OpenAI partnership has lost sight of that basic fact. A $2 million commitment of that nature should not have moved forward without meaningful input from faculty and students.
How AI is used in the classroom should remain at the discretion of individual professors. They understand their disciplines, their pedagogy, and what their students need. A blanket institutional mandate in either direction, whether requiring AI use or prohibiting it, would be an overreach that undermines faculty expertise and academic freedom.
But there is a broader obligation the University cannot delegate. Regardless of any individual classroom, CU must ensure that every student, across every field of study, graduates with a working understanding of AI technology and its applications. It is about ensuring that no CU graduate enters the workforce unprepared. The cost of that failure falls entirely on the student.
As the only technology attorney in this race, I work with AI issues professionally. I understand both the promise and the risk. CU needs a thoughtful, forward-looking AI framework, and I am uniquely positioned to help build it.