Associated Press

Faced with rising demands for legal work, North Dakota's Board of Higher Education agreed Friday to hire a second attorney for the state university system's central office, despite concerns that the move was taking place too quickly.

During a telephone conference call meeting, the board also agreed to undertake a study of how the system's colleges get their legal work done.

However, board member Duaine Espegard said he believed the study was needed before the hiring took place. Another member, Grant Shaft, said he wondered whether services were being provided efficiently.

"We're now at a point where a lot of these attorneys working for us … are some of the highest-paid state attorneys in the state," Shaft said. "We should make sure that our process in utilizing these attorneys … is as good as it can be, given the dollars we're paying."

The system has six four-year universities and five two-year colleges. Its two largest schools, North Dakota State University and the University of North Dakota, have their own legal staffs. Seaworth does legal work for the other nine schools, most of which involves writing and reviewing contracts and providing advice on personnel and other issues.

Espegard said the study will look into whether UND and NDSU's in-house legal staffs could also do legal work for other schools in the system.

Seaworth said Friday that if another system attorney were not hired soon, he would suggest that the other colleges retain their own lawyers. His workload does not allow him to do some needed tasks, such as providing campus training on personnel issues and handling worker grievances, he said.

"There has been a tremendous increase in the number of software licensing and (information technology) consulting and service agreements, educational affiliation agreements, research agreements and other legal documents," Seaworth said in a memo to the board. "The number of contracts and other legal documents requiring review has more than doubled in the last five years."