Some school districts attempt to lower their legal costs by minimizing the number of times they contact an attorney during the school year. This strategy is associated with various kinds of painful and sometimes very expensive consequences that we occasionally read about in daily newspapers. Expensive because when legal matters are not done right at the outset, certain matters can be prohibitively expensive to remedy on the back end of a legal conundrum. Schools officials must adhere to ever-increasing levels of complexities in state and federal law, rules and regulations, and Texas school districts’ sovereign immunity from civil litigation continues to be chipped away. Monetary penalties and refunds, in many instances, far exceed the legal costs of taking items to an attorney before the district becomes committed to omissions in generally accepted standards for school law-related terms and conditions or even adverse terms and conditions. Furthermore, the additional amounts paid to attorneys to address an issue on the back end of a legal conundrum may substantially exceed the amount of monetary penalties and refunds. Be sure your process checklists include a check box for “legal review.” The absence of the check box can be very costly.