Students often face school misconduct charges, academic progression issues, disability accommodation disputes, or other behavioral or academic issues. When they do, they usually quickly realize their need for skilled and experienced attorney defense. But they also reasonably question the cost of that defense. Simply know that the costs you face, or your student faces if you are the parent or guardian of a minor student, from school disciplinary charges to academic remediation or lost accommodations and educational opportunities are far greater than the cost of skilled and experienced legal defense. Retain the Lento Law Firm's Student Defense Team now for your best outcome to school charges. Failing to vigorously defend against accusations can be incredibly costly. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form to tell us about your case.
Common Student Defense Issues
Schools from the elementary and secondary levels all the way to college or the university, and even beyond to graduate or professional school, can have exacting standards that students sometimes find hard to meet. Many students face serious school issues, threatening to impede their academic progress or even destroy their educational investment and academic and vocational goals and success. Those consequences can carry enormous, even life-long, costs. Don't be surprised if you suddenly and unexpectedly face school charges for one or more of the following common student issues:
- academic misconduct alleging exam or assignment cheating, plagiarism, unauthorized collaboration, use of unauthorized materials, unauthorized access to exam questions or banks, and other violations of the school's academic code or code of honor;
- behavioral misconduct alleging unlawful or unauthorized possession of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, weapons, or pornography, interference with school fire alarms or fire-suppression equipment, fighting and other violence, property theft or damage, trespassing, vandalism, and other criminal, disruptive, or endangering behaviors;
- sexual assault, sex discrimination, sexual harassment of the hostile environment or quid pro quo forms, stalking, dating violence, sexual exploitation, voyeurism, indecent exposure, and other sexual misconduct violating Title IX or school standards;
- academic progression issues involving excessive absences, excessive tardiness, excessive course incompletes, failures, or withdrawals, a cumulative grade-point average below the school's mandatory minimum, and excessive terms off extending the duration of matriculation beyond the school's maximum terms or years; and
- disability accommodation issues involving building, classroom, laboratory, library, or clinic access, modified schedules, the need for readers, note-takers, or other assistive devices and services, or the need for an isolated exam room or extended exam or assignment time.
Common Student Sanctions
If you do face one or more of the above common school issues or another school issue, understand the severe sanctions and conditions the school may impose. When a school finds you or your student responsible for misconduct, the sanctions can run the gamut from a modest warning or oral or written reprimand to extra assignments, remedial education or training, lowered or failing grades, and loss of course credit, all the way to school suspension or expulsion. If your student is in elementary or secondary school, the sanction may be a referral for alternative disciplinary placement, commonly known as boot camp or reform school. Any finding of disciplinary responsibility, whether connected with a mild, moderate, or severe sanction or even no sanction at all, may well appear on your school transcript for other schools, graduate schools, employers, and others to see. Schools impose the above sanctions under student codes of conduct like those in place at the following schools:
- the University of Texas at Austin;
- the University of North Carolina;
- Johns Hopkins University and its professional schools;
- the State University of New York;
- The University of Michigan
- the University of California, Los Angeles; and
- Arizona State University.
Hidden Student Defense Costs
The costs of facing student disciplinary issues are typically hidden costs. Your school or your student's school are not likely to outright fine you, although schools sometimes impose monetary penalties like restitution or may require unpaid school or community service. Your bigger monetary losses are likely to be tuition you paid, or tuition loans you must repay, for courses for which you lost credit, and for the terms and even years of education you completed toward a degree your school may now refuse to let you complete. You may have paid or committed to pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of tuition, room, and board expenses, with zero return on your investment, if your school revokes or refuses to issue your degree or suspends or expels you in a way that keeps you from completing it. These tuition, room, and board costs can dwarf your attorney defense costs.
Forgone and Delayed Earnings
Even if you do get to proceed toward earning your degree in the face of student disciplinary charges, those charges may require you to delay your degree by one or more terms. Every additional term may mean not only additional tuition, room, and board but also additional forgone earnings. Students in higher education rarely realize that forgone earnings can be a larger cost than the tuition, room, and board. Every term in school is a term out of the workforce, except perhaps for part-time employment. Every extra term required because of disciplinary delays is an extra four to six months without earning the income you expected to earn with your degree. And if discipline prevents you from earning the degree, you could suffer lifelong loss of earnings from the job and career for which you expected your degree to win you. Like lost or extra tuition, room, and board, delayed or forgone earnings can dwarf your attorney defense costs.
The High Cost of Collateral Consequences
Unfortunately, the hidden cost of student discipline can go well beyond lost or extra tuition, room and board, and delayed or forgone earnings. A school dismissal or expulsion may mean loss of student housing, student health insurance or medical clinic access, recreational facilities, and transportation. You may have to move into more expensive and less safe and suitable housing. Even in the case of minor or moderate discipline well short of suspension or expulsion, you may also lose references and recommendations from professors, administrators, and advisors that could have won you a transfer to another school, access to graduate school, or a job and career. Any school discipline may also cost you scholarships and awards worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The collateral consequences of school discipline may even include your loss of a professional license or vocational certification, security clearance, immigration status, or other critical right, privilege, or advantage. The cost of skilled and experienced attorney defense pales in comparison to these kinds of losses.
Why You Need Attorney Defense
Your first reaction when considering retaining our Student Defense Team services may be to wonder whether those services have substantial value to you. Trust that they do. Consider, for instance, the resources the school brings against you when, for example, charging you with misconduct or mandating academic remediation that may not be supported by the circumstances. The school has at its disposal the time, commitment, and services of academic administrators and investigators, often with many years of experience. They not only enforce the school's rules. They may also have written those rules, and they will surely interpret them to the school's advantage, often meaning to your disadvantage. You are at a huge resource, skill, and experience disadvantage if you consider going without representation. You may not understand the codes governing your conduct, the procedures you must invoke for your own protection, or how to go about deploying those procedures for your best advantage. Student discipline defense is a technical and strategic endeavor requiring the skills and experience of our Student Defense Team for your best outcome. Don't treat it otherwise.
Valuable Student Defense Services Our Attorneys Can Provide
Our Student Defense Team levels the playing field. Our attorneys can provide the widest range of valuable services, whatever school issues you face. Our attorneys may provide you or your student with any or all of the following services in addition to other helpful or critical actions.
Attorney Appearance for Student Defense
We can appear on your behalf, notifying school officials that you have retained our skilled and experienced attorneys to advocate on your behalf and that your school officials should expect to communicate and negotiate with us. Our appearance shows school officials that you are taking the charges seriously and are ready to raise all appropriate defenses.
Attorney Negotiation for Student Defense
We can advocate and negotiate on your behalf toward an early voluntary resolution through informal conferences, interviews, mediation, and other alternative forms of dispute resolution. We may be able to help you avoid delayed and extensive proceedings and formal hearings, while generating win-win outcomes satisfying the school's interests and avoiding formal discipline on your record. Early voluntary dismissal of the charges should be your primary goal. Our attorneys know how to explore available avenues toward diplomatic, early, voluntary, acceptable, and negotiated relief.
Attorney Evaluation and Advice for Student Defense
We can also obtain the school's detailed charges and evidence supporting the charges to help you evaluate the charges and evidence against you. You must understand the charges, the authority on which the school relies for those charges, and the evidence supporting those charges before you can make wise and informed decisions about your best procedural course and substantive outcome. Once we get the school's charges and evidence, our attorneys can then advise you on your best alternatives.
Attorney Investigation for Student Defense
We can also help you identify, acquire, organize, and present exonerating and mitigating evidence. Whether the school has substantial evidence supporting its disciplinary charges or lacks that evidence, you may have available evidence to refute, balance, or excuse the charges. Once we help you find that evidence, we can organize and present it in its most compelling fashion toward the goal of an early favorable voluntary resolution.
Attorney Advocacy for Student Defense
If your case is not resolved informally at an early stage, then we can also help you invoke your school's formal hearing procedures. If your school's procedures permit it, we can appear at the formal hearing to present your evidence, cross-examine the school's witnesses against you, and otherwise challenge the school's authority and evidence before the independent decision maker. We can also research, brief, and argue the law and procedures before that decision maker toward your most favorable ruling. If the hearing official or panel rules against you, we can help you take an appeal to a higher school official for an independent review and potential reversal of the adverse decision.
The Cost of Unqualified Defense Representation
If you retain unqualified defense representation, you fail to level the playing field. You won't get the above skilled and experienced services of our Student Defense Team. Local criminal defense attorneys, civil litigators, estate planners, real estate lawyers, and other law practitioners generally do not possess the substantial academic and administrative skills and experience necessary to advocate effectively with school officials. Lawyers generally train for court advocacy and business transactions. But school proceedings differ markedly from court or business matters. School officials have different customs, terms, conditions, practices, and conventions. If you hire a local criminal defense attorney who comes in pounding lecterns and making demands, you may well spoil forever the school relationships on which the favorable resolution of your case depends. Our attorneys know the right way to approach school discipline defense.
The Cost of School Advisors
And don't think that you can rely on school advisors. Schools often encourage students to consult with school advisors, even suggesting that advisors can assist students in fashioning their own defense. On the contrary, school advisors have conflicts of interest. They work for, get paid by, and owe their allegiance to the school. You may like them, and they may like you. But they won't be thinking the way our attorneys think about how to strategically and effectively defend you against the charges. They may encourage you to accept sanctions that leave a permanent mark on your school record and conditions that you cannot readily meet and could result in your school suspension and expulsion.
Our Attorney Defense Saves Costs
In this broader view, attorney defense saves rather than costs. You will very likely find it far less costly to hire our Student Defense Team than to retain unqualified counsel or to go unrepresented in your defense matter. Here's why. All of the above services we've described, from our appearance to our negotiation, investigation, evaluation, advice, and advocacy, have substantial value, depending on your individual case. Any one of the above services our attorneys can provide may prove the critical piece to resolving your case favorably, eliminating or substantially reducing the monetary, hidden, and collateral costs of student discipline. If we obtain an early voluntary resolution, you may not only avoid the sanctions and consequences but even avoid the stress, time, and delay of the disciplinary procedures. If we win for you at the formal hearing, then you'll have avoided the severe sanction you might otherwise have faced. If we negotiate remedial education or training or other acceptable terms and conditions that you can readily meet, then you may avoid any mark on your academic record so that you can achieve all your educational and vocational goals.
Attorney Defense If You've Already Lost Your Hearing
If a formal hearing has already resulted in discipline against you, then it may not be too late to take advantage of the substantial value of our services. Retain our Student Defense Team to evaluate and pursue your appeal rights. Just because you lose at a formal hearing does not mean you must submit to the school's sanctions. Schools like those named above routinely provide students with the right to appeal an adverse decision to a new decision maker or panel of decision makers. Northwestern University's appeal procedure is another example. An appeal panel can correct a decision that was unfair in its procedures, erroneous on the law or other school authority, not supported by substantial admissible and trustworthy evidence, or made by a biased official or officials with conflicts of interest. We can help you invoke the appeal procedure, identify the appeal grounds, draft the appeal brief, and argue the appeal before the appellate official or panel. Let us review your case, even if you have already lost your formal hearing.
Alternative Special Relief
If you have already lost both your formal hearing and appeal, our attorneys may still be able to help you. One of the greatest values our attorneys can bring in certain cases is their national reputation and relationships. Our attorneys may already have dealt fruitfully with your school's officials, general counsel, or outside retained counsel. Even if not, our attorneys often find that their national reputation opens doors for them to school general counsel offices and other oversight officials within or connected to the school. Once we contact those oversight officials, we are often able to show them that the school's greater regulatory, liability and reputational interest is to give you another chance, reinstating you with or without conditions, so that you can pursue and complete your education and realize the full value of your investment. Our attorneys have proven the value of their services time and again through alternative special relief.
Making the Right Calculation
When considering retaining a student defense attorney, you must make the right calculation. You must not overlook the actual monetary costs of student discipline, the hidden costs of student discipline, and the cost of short- and long-term collateral consequences of student discipline. Those costs can easily dwarf the costs of retaining our Student Defense Team. Make the right calculation. And don't think that retaining unqualified local counsel will save you money in the outcome and long run. Unqualified local counsel may make your situation worse, not better, and may not achieve the outcome you need to minimize all of your potential disciplinary costs. If you have any questions about the value of our services after reading the above information, then speak with our attorneys. They can help you understand the financial and other advantages of our representation and the costs and other disadvantages of going without representation or employing unqualified defense counsel.
Knowing What's at Stake
In the end, to make the right calculation on costs, you must know what you have at stake. The above information shows you the sanctions you could face, the direct costs those sanctions may impose, the hidden costs you face when suffering certain sanctions, and the collateral consequences, too. You have a lot at stake. Don't ignore disciplinary charges or other school issues that may frustrate and defeat your educational goals. Remember why you pursued and invested in your education in the first place. You very likely had an educational and vocational dream you wished to pursue. That dream likely had at least some financial value and perhaps substantial financial value. The lifetime difference in earnings from various certificates, diplomas, licenses, and degrees can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions of dollars. You may have made that calculation when considering enrolling in your program and paying the necessary tuition, room, and board. Don't overlook the value of your investment. If you have any questions about your stakes in the matter you face, then consult our attorneys. Our attorneys know what you have at stake.
Premier Student Defense Services Available Nationwide
The Lento Law Firm's Student Defense Team is available to represent you or your student nationwide, no matter the school, program, or nature of the issue or disciplinary charges. We have successfully represented hundreds of students across the country to defend and defeat disciplinary charges or otherwise resolve their school issues. Don't make a miscalculation. Don't overlook the hidden costs of student discipline. Value our attorney services properly, and you'll see that your best move is to retain us immediately to advocate for an early favorable resolution, avoiding much more substantial costs. Call 888.535.3686 now or use our contact form to tell us about your case.
