Hi, Andrea,
I've worked at places where things do not go to legal regularly, and those where they all went to legal, and took a minimum of four weeks for review. As you said, the contracts go to the bottom of the pile, because other things are deemed more critical.
From working at an institution that sends all legal things out for review because they didn't have in house full time legal counsel, to a place with an office of several attorneys, and at least one that had someone with a law degree who did some general counsel work but also had another area of responsibility, I can tell you that I do appreciate having legal review. Of course, I didn't appreciate our reviews being relegated to the bottom of the pile, but since I didn't have a lot of training in legalese, it was wonderful knowing someone else did.
I know larger institutions that have contract review personnel and it works out very well. Training, experience and skill are of course critical.
I'd say the middle of the road approach has been my favorite so far. Get the right kind of people to be able to review basic contracts and provide them with a good list of what is acceptable and what isn't, as well as some reasonable revisions, and then hopefully only send complicated, odd, or perhaps new entity agreements to legal for full review.
I don't have a solution to the bottom of the pile issue. I can tell you that I once worked with an attorney with whom I'd worked in another capacity. Occasionally it helped that he knew I was only requesting a rush when I absolutely had to. But not always.
------------------------------
Pamela Vargas
Director, Research & Grant Development
Southeast Missouri State University
------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 03-25-2022 08:55
From: Andrea Buford
Subject: Legal review of contracts
Disclaimer: If you work at the same institution where I work, please know this is not a PLAN. This is fact-finding in the service of something I hope becomes a plan ;)
So, at different places where I've worked, signature authority and review of contracts has happened in different ways. At one place, we started out by sending all contracts (not subawards off grants, but everything else) to Legal for review. Then, "magically" Legal let us review and sign contracts ourselves. We developed a matrix so we knew when we were out of our depth and needed to rope Legal back in. Now that same institution has just hired a lawyer who sits in OSP somewhere and does contract review.
Here, pretty much every contract goes to Legal. Not subawards and not anything that is on a University-approved template (which is a change since I got here), but everything else. The thing is, that little $4000 contract for a PhD student to go do data collection somewhere is vital to her, but Legal has real stuff to do. And our contracts inevitably go to the bottom of the work pile. And I imagine there work pile is at least the size of mine, which is formidable. The approval delays are disturbing, and I know Legal's preffered way of doing business. But, being me, I'm looking for a system-level improvement.
So, how are contracts handled in your world? And if you've navigated the change that allow OSP to review simple but non-standard contracts without Legal, what did that navigation look like? And how did you choose to staff that new obligation?
Many thanks!
A
------------------------------
Andrea Buford
Director, Office of Sponsored Programs
Oakland University
------------------------------