Legal Services
Telephone Consultation Service

Phone consultation is available, at no additional charge, to school district decision makers, including each trustee and the superintendent. Additionally, the board and superintendent may authorize others to seek and act upon legal advice for the district. Legal Services also provides phone consultation to representatives of TASB’s other active and associate members: ESCs, educational cooperatives, and county appraisal districts.

Consulting with TASB Legal Services is easy. Simply call our toll-free number, 800.580.5345, and leave your information with our administrative staff. On any given day, there are attorneys whose first responsibility is to answer your questions. One of those attorneys will return your call, in the order in which it was received. Calls are answered between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm most business days. Calls initiated after 4:30 pm may be returned the following business day.

Yes. We have purposefully structured our consultation service in order to create an attorney-client relationship with member districts, and we make every effort to preserve the attorney-client privilege of confidentiality in our conversations with districts. Unless we have your permission, we do not share the contents of our phone conversations with anyone outside of TASB Legal Services or duly authorized representatives of the school district.

Occasionally, more than one representative of a school district will call with related questions about the same issue. In these circumstances, please bear in mind that the attorney-client privilege rests with the district as an entity, not with any individual person. Consequently, when necessary in the representation of the district, the content of conversations may be disclosed to other representatives of the same district.

We request that callers do not record our confidential communications. Recording and sharing confidential legal advice will jeopardize the attorney-client privilege that protects the phone advice to school district clients.

TASB Legal Services provides legal consultation to TASB’s members as a benefit of membership. Consequently, Legal Services defines its clients as the boards of public school districts and community colleges, as well as education service centers, educational cooperatives, and central appraisal districts. The Legal Services attorneys do not represent TASB, and they are authorized to exercise professional judgment independent of TASB’s interests. Legal Services’ own job descriptions emphasize that the attorneys practice preventative law, offering advice that helps districts avoid legal challenge whenever possible. While TASB as an organization may take a variety of public positions in its public communications and advocacy, when a member consults with TASB Legal Services, the member will be offered legal advice intended to help the district avoid legal conflict and legal liability. In other words, we intentionally give cautious legal advice. As an organization TASB advocates for local control, but if you call Legal Services for advice, the lawyers are committed to assessing and pointing out the potential risks in local decisions.

No. Because TASB Legal Services serves TASB’s school district members as clients, offering legal advice to parents or other members of the public would be a conflict of interest. Similarly, we do not advise employees of a district about their employment rights.

Yes. Each trustee is an elected official who represents the district, and TASB Legal Services responds to calls from all members. Remember, however, that as attorneys seeking to represent the interests of your school district, our ethical duty of loyalty extends to the board as a whole, not to individual members.

No. We offer a free service that can be a money and time saver for districts. We offer advice on a wide range of topics, our attorneys all have several years of experience focused exclusively on school-law issues, and our statewide scope and deep connection to the policy and governmental relations functions of TASB give us a bird’s eye view of Texas public education that can be valuable to school officials and school attorneys alike.

That said, the service has its limits. We do not provide representation of school districts in contested matters. If your district were to choose a course of action and later be challenged on the decision, we in Legal Services would not be the attorneys you would call upon to defend the choice. We are also limited in our knowledge of the relevant facts and circumstances to the information provided in a brief phone conversation. Even seemingly simple legal issues can become complicated as one gathers more information about the factual context. In such circumstances, the district’s own attorney is in a superior position to assimilate the relevant facts.

We do our best to answer every question, but when appropriate, we will not hesitate to refer callers to their district’s own counsel.

No. The district’s private attorney should write any formal legal opinions for the district. Although TASB attorneys may provide callers with citations to policy, case law, statutes, and other legal sources to support their legal advice and reasoning, TASB attorneys do not issue formal letter opinions.

Yes. We have a Legal Inbox that members may use to send questions by email. The email address is legal@tasb.org. Typically, attorneys will respond to your email by calling you, not by emailing a response. We do this because we find that live conversations give us a better chance to ask you questions and offer more complete answers and advice. We will respond to your email with a phone call on the next business day (or sooner) if you provide your name, school district, position at the district, and phone number along with your inquiry.

We welcome you to call TASB Legal Services whenever you have a question or concern regarding legal issues faced by your district.