Education & EdTech

Hart David Carson LLP advises education and EdTech businesses on the corporate and regulatory work that runs underneath a learning company: entity formation and equity, venture and growth financings, M&A, IP and content licensing, commercial and platform contracts, student-data privacy, and the accreditation and consumer-protection posture the sector requires. A partner runs the engagement, and we coordinate with education-regulatory or locally admitted counsel where a matter calls for it.

It decides what the contract must say and what the product must do. With a school the vendor is a "school official" under FERPA, so the agreement has to keep the records under the school's control, limit their use to the school's purposes and bar redisclosure, with deletion at the end. Under COPPA, consent for children under 13 may come from the school only for its educational purpose, so any use of the data for the vendor's own product development or advertising needs the parent, and the amended Rule in force since 2025 requires separate consent before data goes to third parties for advertising, a written retention policy and a security program. Illinois adds a signed, publicly posted agreement with each district and breach notice to the school within 30 days. We write those terms once, into a data addendum the sales team can sign without calling us.

We advise education clients on the regulation and consumer-protection rules that bear on their model, including institutional and program structure, disclosure and enrollment practices, and matters before regulators such as the FTC and state authorities. Where accreditation, licensure, or a specific agency proceeding requires education-regulatory or locally admitted counsel, we coordinate that work so the regulatory posture is in the right hands.

Whoever the paper says. An employee's courseware is the employer's by statute; a contractor's is the company's only if it fits one of the Copyright Act's nine work-for-hire categories and a signed agreement says so, and otherwise only by a present-tense assignment. Instructors who bring their own material license it, and the license should say whether the company may edit, translate and keep using it after they leave. Third-party media and openly licensed material carry their own terms, and a non-commercial Creative Commons license does not become commercial because it sits inside a paid course. If learners upload content, the platform's safe harbor for infringement claims depends on a registered agent at the Copyright Office, renewed every three years. We audit the chain of title before a financing does.

We act for companies, founders, and investors across venture and growth rounds and buy- and sell-side M&A, handling term sheets and financing documents, cap-table and option-pool modeling, diligence, and the corporate housekeeping a deal depends on. In education, diligence reaches into data practices, content rights, and regulatory exposure, so we align those workstreams early to keep a financing or sale from stalling on cleanup.

Yes. A learning platform that crosses the Atlantic meets a different age of consent (16 by default in the EU, 13 in the United Kingdom), a children's design code in Britain, and a school that is a data controller under the GDPR with the vendor as its processor under a written Article 28 agreement. Moving the data back to US servers needs an approved transfer mechanism and a transfer assessment. We handle the US structure and the contracts from Chicago, work through partner firms in London and Dubai, and engage locally admitted counsel from a partner network of about 51 jurisdictions for the local filings a market requires.