How do you pick a legal team for your education misconduct situation?
Most of the situations where a male student lost his career because the school’s Title IX office turned what might have been a false complaint of sexual misconduct into a train wreck have little history. Most of them, in fact, date from 2011. Compare that with cases about plagiarism, something that has been prosecuted under schools’ codes at least since World War II and you come out with one realization: If sexual misconduct expulsions are that new, not that many lawyers and legal teams exist to handle them. Dealing with sexual misconduct in college requires a specific, niche, and not readily available set of skills—if you want to have your best chance at proving your innocence.
When you start googling for “misconduct lawyers” or “Title IX” lawyers, you will get a few false positives and several hits that you will not be able to evaluate unless you consider:
1. Experience.
A legal team that represents you in sexual misconduct needs specific experience having dealt with students in at least another higher education setting. Preferably, this team will have experience dealing with sexual misconduct during law suits in Federal Court. And, perhaps more importantly, this team needs to have broad experience dealing with all the other issues that come up dealing with a client, like you, who most likely is young, is outraged, and faces his first ever legal procedure. This is why, in our experience, we like to educate the client-respondent, something more rewarding than merely suing for him.
2. Personality.
Ask yourself if you prefer someone who teaches you how to learn or someone who tells you what you need to know. Also ask yourself is you need someone who relates with you on an emotional level, or if you prefer someone who remains emotionally aloof. Frankly, none of these alternatives is wrong, it all depends on what will make a good fit and only you know that because only you know how much of an introverted or extroverted personality you have and, importantly, how much you are able, willing, and needing to discuss the interior pain that this trauma causes you. In all cases, make sure your legal team has good listening and communicating skills. Do not go for the lawyers who come across as haughty. Avoid haughty.
3. Cost.
It is practically impossible to know the cost of saving your career. It is customary to ask for an amount up front and to go from there. That amount varies but it’s not the case, as so many believe that you are going to find free legal services for this situation. If there is a leak in your plumbing you pay a plumber to plug it; same here. What you can gauge is the overall expenditure trend based on the lawyer’s experience level. If you hire a lawyer who has not done Title IX work before, but who shows you, for example, lots of criminal work, you will pay more in the long run. The opposite is true: The most experienced Title IX lawyers will ask you for more money upfront, but more than likely you come out ahead in the long run.
4. Technology.
If one of your candidate legal team sends you a document in MSWord—a program that many old law firms use because that is the program that the Courts started using way before you were born—you may want to consider going elsewhere. If any one of your candidate legal team can’t provide you with a remote signing app; think about it: How will you get them your signature on the many, many documents you’ll need to sign. In addition, your legal team needs to communicate with you in a technologically seamless and, preferably, encrypted, manner. So go ahead and ask them, for example, what software they use to communicate with you. If they say “fax”…well…
5. Timeliness.
Timeliness stresses out many respondents of sexual misconduct because they want to know right away what may take weeks if not months. That said, you need to flatly, bluntly and aggressively ask your candidate legal teams what is their response time. If your house is on fire you would like prompt response from your local fire company, and the same is true when you respond to sexual misconduct.
6. Risk Management.
Your candidate legal teams need to tell you what your risk is. Sexual misconduct respondents face risk that goes from the humiliation of social shunning on campus, to inability to apply to grad schools, and, in the worst cases, prison. As a hallmark of good lawyering, the team you pick will not just tell you an (accurate) evaluation of your risk, but also a series of strategies and suggestions to prevent further risk. Not everyone you talk to thinks on those levels; and not everyone will share this information for free.
7. Network.
Possibly one of the most important factors in picking a lawyer for responding to sexual misconduct is picking one that has a network of misconduct professionals—including other lawyers, education experts, school consultants and private investigators who can help. The legal team or lawyer who tells you that they can handle your sexual misconduct case as they would a traffic ticket for drunk driving may not have the best network to help you out in the most professional way.
On the other hand, you need to be a good client and your better legal teams will only let you hire them if they realize that you are such a man. Nothing in sexual misconduct works out well if you don’t get involved. This means, for example:
1. Have all the information organized.
Not only does your lack of a timeline and records cost you more (as your lawyer has to reconstruct all of that and bill you for it), your lawyers will be delighted to know that you have all the information, archived, on file folders that you can easily access and transmit. You need to download, copy, and safely store away from your school account, copies of all the information that relates to your sexual misconduct.
2. Read all the documents your lawyers give you.
By the time a sexual misconduct proceeding ends with a good result (dismissal of the charge and expungement being the best result) you will have read hundreds, if not thousands of single spaced typed sheets of paper. The same is true for your lawyer. But you need to read everything because that is the only way to find errors. By the time you get to court, often times you will need to swear that what you submit is true to the best of your information and belief—that oath requires you to have the information, by reading it.
3. Speak up.
Do not let your lawyers not hear your full story. Make sure your lawyers hear all the facts and the problems and your worries and fears. Write these out and make a checklist of them before talking with your candidate legal teams.
4. Be calm.
A sexual misconduct accusation puts you in the outrageous situation of risking the loss of your career over some sexual or even non-sexual event that you thought was proper. In some instances it may be the case that you are the victim of some form of sexual assault or hostility from the person now accusing you of the same. In any event, you need to calmly respond. That response needs to be candid, open, and vulnerable. That response requires you to walk over a lake of fire, as you revisit your fears and traumas. So be ready to cry. But be calm.
Raul Jauregui
Jauregui Law Firm
I am an attorney and I defend mostly respondents of sexual misconduct in colleges or universities. This is absolutely not my legal opinion or my legal advice, but rather survey of the Title IX topic. If you’re in this situation, in any way, consult a lawyer now.
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