The State Bar Association of North Dakota Spring 2015 Gavel Magazine | Page 18

MOVING

TO IMPROVE
Basically, we worked to successfully solve
every single problem that arose during our
relocated year.

You can see the photo sets of the entire
construction process on our web site at
http://law.und.edu/build/.

And now, at the end of our relocated
academic year, we are gearing up to do it all
again.

The new and improved School of Law is
nearing completion on schedule. We are
anticipating moving back into our muchmissed building in August, in time for
the start of the 2015-2016 academic year.
We’ve printed more color-coded labels,
and we’re starting to pack boxes. We’re
already planning a grand opening for UND
Homecoming in October 2015!

While we’ve been maintaining all of our
ordinary operations under extraordinary
circumstances, our construction team has
been doing the real heavy lifting to build the
School of Law’s future.

K AT H R Y N R . L . R A N D
Dean, University of North Dakota
School of Law
Last summer, with the good work (and good
humor!) of our School of Law students,
staff, and faculty, we successfully packed
up the law school and relocated all of our
operations to other parts of campus. We
did this in order to facilitate the completion
of our building project on a relatively short
timeline—just over a year from start to
finish.
We packed everything up with color-coded
labels, dividing it all into long term storage,
short term storage, and “need this right
away!” piles. We left the big things for the
movers, and pushed carts across campus
with the rest. We moved faculty and staff
offices to five different buildings. We set up
classrooms in eight different buildings.
We issued new keys, transferred phone lines,
rerouted mail, addressed security issues,
shuffled classrooms to meet student and
instructional needs, coordinated with the
university’s class schedule, set up student
study spaces, located “lost” items, passed
out campus maps, troubleshot technology,
fixed furniture . . . well, you get the picture.
18

THE GAVEL

The construction team’s hard work, funded
in critical part by several donations from our
alumni and friends, has kept us on our ideal
schedule of displacing students for as short a
time as possible—a single academic year and
two summer sessions.
Demolition started in July 2014. By August,
there was a big hole in the ground for the
addition. In September, we had concrete
footings in place. We celebrated construction
in October, with a brick-laying ceremony
attended by Lt. Governor Drew Wrigley,
Chief Justice VandeWalle, and Sen. Ray
Holmberg. In November, we marked the
completion of the steel structure of the
addition with a “topping off ” for all of our
construction workers and our law school
community.
By December, the walls of the addition were
up and interior renovations had transformed
the floorplan throughout the existing
building. January saw the construction of the
addition’s roof, and in February, we raised
the roof onto the addition. In March, the
addition’s concrete floors were poured and a
really big crane was brought in to place the
new chiller over the library roof. In April, as
I write this, new brick is up on the addition
walls and new windows are installed in the
library.

We still need your help in completing the
funding for the project. After the state
authorized private donations of up to $2.5
million toward the building project, many of
our alumni and friends have come forward
with much-needed and generous gifts,
including several major naming gifts. These
gifts have helped to transform the School of
Law.
We could not have come this far without
your help—the gifts we’ve received have
been critical as we build for the future.
If yo H