Cost Certainty for Higher Education

Managing Records on Campus
From simple policies to complex schedules, explore a fixed-fee project rate from Saul Ewing.

Records, records everywhere! What do we have to keep? What do we want to keep? Who's keeping it and for how long? Institutions of higher education face these questions with increasing frequency, particularly as they navigate the unchartered waters of 2008's Higher Education Opportunity Act and complete the new IRS Form 990 for tax-exempt organizations.

Saul Ewing's Higher Education Practice Group can help. Our attorneys have counseled college and university administrators on hard copy and electronic records identification, retention, organization and destruction. Our work in this area has ranged from creating simple templates to conducting exhaustive cataloguing of records. With this experience, we can predict the time involved in projects at either end of the spectrum. Therefore, we are proud to offer your institution our Cost Certainty Commitment plan for creating or updating a records retention and destruction policy.

Under our Cost Certainty Commitment program, we offer three fixed-fee arrangements for a Records Identification/Retention/Destruction Project: Basic, Advanced and Comprehensive. As discussed below, we also offer a fixed fee arrangement for work related to establishing a Whistleblower policy.

Records Project – Levels of Service

Basic: This level of service provides a high-level identification of the institution's data universe, basic research as required, and preparation of mutually-acceptable policies and schedules from existing templates. After we provide this "starter kit" to your institution, it will then be your institution's responsibility to flesh out the policy with additional detail and specificity as you see fit. If applied as designed, this "basic" service should allow your institution to answer on the new IRS Form 990 that it has a document retention policy in place. The final fixed fee will be determined up front based, in large part, on the size of your institution.

Advanced: We will provide the same services described in the Basic plan as well as hands-on document review, meetings with administrators, and more extensive legal research. Again, the final fixed fee will be determined, up front, based in large part on the size of your institution.

Comprehensive: This thorough service should be used if your institution has little to no existing records management system, needs identification of what documents and data it has, and/or needs this project to also serve as a data cataloguing project. Our Higher Ed lawyers will physically search your files and databases (with appropriate IT and paralegal assistance), gather all information, organize and index the data with as much detail as you'd like, perform precise and thorough research for each category of pertinent data, and develop an appropriate retention plan, policy, and schedules for the records universe we compile and identify. The final fixed fee will be determined up front based on the extent of services your institution requires.

Whistleblower Policy

We are also able to offer the preparation of a Whistleblower Policy, as referenced on the Form 990, for a fixed fee. The scope of work will include communicating with appropriate contacts at your institution to make sure you understand your options and we understand your preferences, creating a draft policy for your review, incorporating appropriate edits, and preparing the final product.

For more information on these cost containment strategies and particular pricing options, please contact James A. Keller at 215.972.1964 or jkeller@saul.com, William E. Manning at 302.421.6868 or wmanning@saul.com, or Amy C. Foerster at 717.257.7573 or afoerster@saul.com.