Services

Working together in a complex compliance environment.

Working with partner organizations, consultants, and suppliers is often necessary to achieve the best possible results in your grant funded work. Yet, those relationships must also be managed to ensure compliance with federal requirements:

  • Vendors (now commonly called “contractors”) must be engaged in a manner compliant with the federal procurement standards.
  • Subgrantees (now commonly called “subrecipients”) must be carefully overseen to ensure funds are properly used and project goals are accomplished, which in turn requires the thoughtful drafting and negotiation of subaward agreements.
  • Collaborative research agreements, whether structured as subawards or contractual arrangements, must be structured to take into account both grant management and research integrity considerations.
  • Other partnership opportunities must be structured to avoid the inadvertent creation of compliance risk with respect to your federal funding.

Working closely with our clients, our attorneys assist in devising strategy, establishing compliant procurement procedures, drafting and negotiating tailored agreements, preparing flexible standard agreements suited to a particular client’s recurring needs, and assisting in oversight.

An area of particular compliance focus with the advent of the Uniform Guidance, our attorneys frequently assist clients with all manner of subaward matters. We assist our clients from the “passthrough entity perspective” with drafting, negotiation, and implementation of subaward agreements vis-à-vis their prospective subrecipients. We also assist our clients from the “subrecipient perspective” with navigating the negotiation agreements proposed by state or local governments and nonprofit passthrough entities.

In the health care sector, we assist our clients with all manner of transactional matters, from subaward and research matters described above to complex affiliation arrangements with health systems and other local partners as well as agreements with payors, value-based arrangements, and agreements necessary to safeguard protected health information.