TO:  NAVREF Members
FROM:  Barbara West, Executive Director

Please see below an email to OGC Corporations Panel members. Pat Watts is the OGC PSG III Staff Attorney with responsibility for legal issues related to CRADAs. She shares this responsibility with Associate General Counsel Renée Szybala and Staff Attorney Jane Gutcher.

Pat’s email details the current process for reviewing CRADAs that in the opinion of Regional Counsel attorneys contain substantive changes to the model and therefore require consultation with TTP and perhaps also with OGC. CT CRADAs that do not contain substantive changes may still be reviewed and approved locally by the Regional Counsel.

Consistent with a recommendation by the Szybala/Hammond Review Team, the CRADA Work Group was reconstituted in early February with NPCs represented by myself, Dave Johnson and Tony Laracuente. The WG has been meeting weekly to fine-tune existing model CRADAs and to develop new ones. VA attorneys Jim Klein and Dennis McGuire are providing valuable assistance on the CT CRADA effort. A subset of the group is also working to complete master CRADAs.

Please watch for updates on CRADAs in the coming weeks.

Have a good weekend.

Barbara

Email from Pat Watts:

Hi, Panel! We just wanted to provide you with a quick update on the process we are using for reviewing CRADAs here in Central Office. A couple of you have already encountered this, so apologies for repetition.

We have agreed to a process with TTP in which they will take a “quick look” at incoming CRADAs (regardless whether the source is the NPC, VAMC or regional counsel) to determine if there are policy issues that would cause them not to agree to the CRADA. When they have done that, if they see nothing that is an “automatic stop,” they will “task” PSG III with reviewing the documents. The two offices will then conduct their respective comprehensive reviews simultaneously, discussing, as necessary, any issues discovered on either side as we work. Once we are finished, PSG III will provide our comments back to TTP. OGC’s and TTP’s comments will be incorporated into a single response from TTP to the person submitting the CRADA. We are hoping that this will help decrease the time it takes to get responses back to the field.

This should not be interpreted as preventing you from calling or emailing us separately with specific legal questions that you want to discuss with OGC. This merely refers to the process we are implementing for reviewing agreements from the field. We hope to have a formal written procedure for the field on this soon. You can also continue, if you like, to send the agreements to the attention of both TTP and PSG III. GSG III will wait to hear from Amy on whether they want us to move forward but we will know that something may be coming.

We will be alerting you to more changes like this as we finalize them. And, as I said, we hope to provide you with formal written procedures soon.

If you have questions, please let me know.

Pat