One of the most private offices at Duke, the University Counsel might also be its busiest, often fending off as many as 30 cases at once. This year, for example, Duke has balanced its regular staple of malpractice, personnel and intellectual property cases with high-profile lawsuits like the Title IX case Heather Sue Mercer v. Duke University.
The office itself follows one of two unique management paradigms for legal defense at universities. University Counsel David Adcock said that by using external litigators in addition to staff attorneys, the office can use specialists for each individual case and save money and time by retaining only a handful of lawyers.
Duke keeps only seven lawyers on staff, while Stanford University, which runs its operations similarly, employs five. But the much larger University of Michigan, which has a central legal office with branches for development, health systems and technology management, employs 21 attorneys.
"Litigation schedules are pretty unpredictable, with peaks and valleys in terms of activity. When a judge calls a case, attorneys have to be ready to be in court; at other times, we can wait for months as the court system operates," Adcock said. "Also, litigation often requires a specialized expertise. If we are involved in a patent case affecting biotechnology, we want a lawyer who probably has a Ph.D. in the relevant field, like molecular biology as well as a law degree."
As many as four suits each month involve Duke but are primarily disputes between contractors and subcontractors on Duke construction projects. The most substantial cases often involve either medical malpractice or non-medical issues like worker's compensation and patent ownership. Like most university counsels' offices, Duke's does not provide personal legal advice to members of the community.
Work at a university raises a wide range of legal questions-for example, the development office, the University's fund-raisers-must pay attention to personnel and privacy protection issues, while many of the University's most innovative professors must consider the patent and intellectual property issues raised by their research.
As a result, much of Duke's in-house attorneys' time is spent managing the development of legal cases and consulting members of the University community. The office is responsible for advising employees and faculty members on rules and legal compliance, which can take several shapes depending on the nature of the University entity.
Linda Woodward, Stanford director of legal services, explained that retaining a small group of staff attorneys allows lawyers to become intimately familiar with their university and thus provide better services in the consulting role. At the same time, they are empowered to tap into a large pool of outside lawyers for specialized knowledge.
"We feel that's a good way to provide legal services," Woodward said. "It provides us greater depth in areas. There's a Stanford team and they get to know the university inside and out, and yet they can draw from the depth and breadth of 600 lawyers on a particular issue."
Like Stanford, Duke draws from a huge base of private attorneys, sometimes hiring out of the state on particular cases. For example, for its most high-profile case of this year, Mercer v. Duke, the University employed John Simpson, a Washington, D.C. partner at the prestigious law firm Fulbright and Jaworski.
Adcock would not reveal how much Duke spends on lawsuits each year because potential litigants could use the figure as a benchmark to determine whether to sue and how much to sue for. He said, however, that external litigation costs have fallen 30 percent over the last 10 years.
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