Strategic Legal Planning: 

     The College & University Legal Audit  

Legal Audits for colleges and universities have been recommended for many years. Until now there has been no useful, concrete, well written, or comprehensive audit which directly addresses the legal issues faced by college and university campuses. CLI has now published: Strategic Legal Planning: The College and University Legal Audit.

The Legal Audit provides a thorough analysis and an instrument to facilitate your campus colleagues in actively practicing preventive law. College administrators need to constantly monitor the institution’s potential vulnerabilities and pursue strategic preventive legal initiatives.

The nine chapter comprehensive audit assesses more than 65 specific areas and provides analyses for minimizing legal exposure.

The Legal Audit offers college decision makers many practical benefits:

• Provides a tool to reduce legal exposure

• Emphasizes points on which to focus for a complete compliance review

• Aids in the development of policy assessment and formulation

• Helps in identifying policy gaps and ambiguities which can be rectified

• Allows administrators to undertake their own self assessment

• Points to areas which need policy development or enforcement

• Provides an assessment guide easily adaptable to different institutions

• Illustrates to administrators, faculty, and staff their legal compliance obligations

The Administration chapter of the Legal Audit, for example, examines such important topics as: Nondiscrimination; Affirmative Action Employment Criteria; Application Process; Recruitment Procedures; Compensation and Tax Issues; Hiring Practices and Procedures; References; Leave; Personnel Files; Security; Drugs and Safety; Institutional Policies; Bursar; Buildings and Grounds; Procurement Compliance; Capital Construction; Building Maintenance; Risk Management; and Insurance.

In addition to analyses on each of the more than 65 topics, the Audit includes an invaluable 40 page Legal Audit Assessment with over 400 audit issues, six checklists, and seven sample policies. The Legal Audit Assessment is available on computer disk so that it may be easily distributed and completed for each administrative area.