The Business Counsel Unit can be reached at 614-644-6342. The Business Counsel Unit advises and represents the Attorney General’s Office and Ohio’s officeholders, agencies, commissions and institutions of higher education in a wide variety of transactional and business matters, including in the areas of: procurement, real estate, construction, public finance, energy conservation, and intellectual property.
- We are responsible for all contracts for the procurement of services executed on behalf of the Attorney General’s Office. In Fiscal Year 2012, we approved more than 600 contracts on behalf of the Office.
- We review real estate, professional design, construction and other transactional agreements as required by Ohio law and as requested by our clients. In Fiscal Year 2012, Business Counsel reviewed more than 1,200 agreements on behalf of other Ohio officeholders, agencies, commissions and institutions of higher education.
- Upon request, we represent the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission Office of Energy Services and higher education clients on energy conservation projects.
- As a new service to Business Counsel clients, Intellectual Property Counsel is now available to advise and counsel on a full spectrum of intellectual property issues, including on patent-related matters, technology transfer and commercialization.
Noteworthy Projects
- Business Counsel recently partnered with the Ohio Board of Regents and the Inter-University Counsel of Ohio to facilitate the work of the University System of Ohio’s Research and Commercialization Task Force. The Task Force promotes the transfer of research and technology from the state’s higher education institutions to the business community to spur economic development and create jobs. Business Counsel helped develop contract templates, including nondisclosure, sponsored research, master research and testing agreements, which state colleges and universities can use when partnering with private industries to conduct research and move the resulting innovations to market. The templates are intended to simplify negotiations, making the state more attractive for new and emerging science and technology enterprises.
- Business Counsel recently provided legal guidance to two community colleges in the negotiation and development of collaboration agreements with a developer for the provision of additional classroom facilities for these schools. Under this innovative approach to funding classrooms, the developer will redevelop existing commercial buildings for use by the colleges in exchange for sharing a portion of the revenues generated by the use of the new facilities.
- Attorneys from Business Counsel, along with outside counsel and representatives of the Department of Administrative Services, the Ohio School Facilities Commission and the Ohio State University, collaborated in the Construction Reform Documents Working Group, which prepared the rules and contract documents needed to implement newly-available construction delivery methods (Construction Manager at Risk, Design-Build, and general contracting) for public construction.