Health Care Professional and Trade Associations
Trade associations and professional societies face a host of legal issues on which Crowell & Moring has significant experience. Since the firm's founding, we have counseled and litigated for our association clients on the full range of legal issues they confront.
Representative activities include:
- Assisting with corporate formation and organizational efforts, including non-profit and other tax-related issues;
- Drafting codes and guidelines governing membership activities;
- Personnel and employment matters;
- Conference-related issues, such as sponsorship and publishing arrangement, speaker releases, and recording and distribution of proceedings;
- Counseling and litigation on antitrust and tort liability issues presented by membership, certification and promotional activities;
- Representation in development of health benefit plan and product co-branding arrangements for programs offered to association members
- Advising on copyright and IP issues related to new IT initiatives;
- Preparing member educational materials on hot legal topics;
- Professional risk management counseling hotline;
- Litigation to protect associational and other First Amendment constitutional rights;
- Filing amicus briefs and comments in regulatory proceedings
For our health care association clients, our Health Care Group provides the additional benefit of understanding the substantive legal issues facing their members. This unique combination of health care and association expertise, allows the firm to provide value-added services to our association clients. We work with our health care association clients on special education/training programs, association newsletter features with health law developments and surveys of state laws of particular interest to the association’s membership, etc.
We also serve our association clients’ needs for maintaining a window and voice on Congressional and regulatory developments. Through our public policy practice, we are able to provide associations and their members access to experts for substantive input to key Congressional policy-makers. We are particularly attuned to regulatory developments as they affect our association clients and their members, and often play a key role both in providing comments to CMS and other agencies on proposed regulations, as well as directly conferring with regulators to present the viewpoints of our association clients.