You must comprehend fully all rules before using the room reservation system. More importantly, you must implement your use of any room according to these rules.
To see the rooms covered by the room reservation system, see this link.
Room numbers are 3 or 4 characters, e.g., 101, 101B, L101. The left-most character that is a number indicates the floor of the building.
Click on the title to expand the information.
The following rooms are “Special Permission Rooms” and require additional permission from the Associate Dean’s Office (“AD office”) (see 1(c) below):
Follow the steps below to reserve one of the above-listed rooms:
a) Submit your request at least 30 days in advance of the date of the event.
b) Check whether the room is available via this link. Also, check for conflicts or competing events in the Event Calendar and the student organization calendar for events attracting the same audience. One must log into the Event Calendar to see all of its entries.
c) Get permission from the AD office by emailing a request to: adlaw@uh.edu. Your request should provide full details, similar to what you would provide for the Law Center event planning form, or an Event Calendar entry. If you are reserving one of the special clearance rooms, it is very likely you should also be making entries for one or both of the Event Calendar or event planning form. If you have made an entry in the Event Calendar, or a submittal to the event planning form, attach or include those as a screen snipped image to your permission request email. If use of alcohol is planned, please state this in the request.
d) After you have received AD office permission, reserve the room in the system according to any details provided by the AD office.
e) Send to the AD office at adlaw@uh.edu an email attaching the AD office permission and a screen snip image confirming your room reservation in the system. The subject line for this email should be in this form: “Room Resv. For [_room name_] room for these dates: [_dates here_]. Please note that you have not finalized the permission granted without this last step of showing the AD office that your room reservation adhered to the permission granted.
Failure to follow this instruction may result in not having access to the requested room. If you reserved a room in the Event Calendar but do not receive AD office permission to use the room, please remove the Event Calendar entry association with the room requested.
The Special Permission Rooms require 3 business days of notice for after-hours events to allow for door key control management. The requester must communicate directly with Law Facilities to arrange after-hours access management. Law Facilities can be reached at LawBuildingHelp@Central.UH.EDU.
Among the special permission rooms that are enclosable, the Law Center does not expect to use these two rooms for courses except in unusual circumstances: (i) the Foundation Room (101); and (ii) the Judicial Robing Room Sponsored by the Black Law Alumni (101B). The Bill Swenson Family Lobby (L101) and the James and Carol Roach Rooftop Lounge (Terrace – 309) are not applicable to the prior sentence. As a result, once permission has been granted for 101 or 101B, those rooms, along with L101 and 309 if permitted, may be reserved as of when permission is given. One does not need to wait until later when the courses are scheduled for rooms for a semester.
If your event is based on Dean Baynes’ availability, please email Luana Gearing at lgearing@central.uh.edu and Spencer at tmspenc2@central.uh.edu who will provide the Dean’s availability. Thereafter, follow all other steps in these rules.
Two of the special permission rooms have conditions on their use that depend on other rooms.
To reserve the Sheena Courtroom one must reserve separately each half for the exact same time frame. The full courtroom is not reservable in the room reservation system. When reserving the Sheena Courtroom consider also reserving the Foundation Room as overflow or to avoid conflicting events. There are many events that would conflict if one is in the Foundation Room and the other is in the Sheena Courtroom at the same time.
If there is a reservation for the Bill Swenson Family Lobby then the Foundation Room is not reservable at the same time. The room reservation system does not check for this condition, you must check this if you are reserving the Foundation Room.
If reserving the Foundation Room, consider also reserving the Bill Swenson Family Lobby and the Robing Room at the same time. This will help diminish conflicting uses.
Reservations must end by 10:00 p.m. and rooms vacated by then, to allow for cleaning and for custodial services to lock the room. Failure to adhere to the time limit may result in termination of room reservation privileges.
Food and drinks are allowed in any of the reservable rooms. Use of alcohol is prohibited unless permission is granted in advance from the AD office.
If you reserve a classroom during the lunch hour, your meeting MUST end by 12:50pm to allow for the 1:00pm class to begin taking their seats. The room must be clean, or you will risk losing your room reservation privileges.
If you need Law Facilities assistance with setting up the event, a request must be made at least a week in advance of the event date with an email to LawBuildingHelp@Central.UH.EDU. This includes help with rearranging the room or obtaining additional tables and chairs. If there is a need to use UH Facilities to set up the event, your program will be responsible for this cost. If you do need furniture set up, please reserve your room two extra hours before the room is to be ready to allow for set up, and two hours after the event for tear-down. If your event is after hours, then please reserve the room for the rest of the day and until 10:00 a.m. the next morning, to allow for the room to be put back to normal. When reserving the room for consecutive days, please also reserve the nights in between your day events, so nobody reserves the room at night that will require the Law Facilities team to rearrange the furniture at 5:00 p.m., when nobody is on duty. Please note that back-to-back events may create logistical challenges in which case, the request may not be accommodated.
Similarly, if you need LawIT assistance with setting up the event, a Help Desk ticket must be made at least a week in advance of the event date by submitting a detailed email to lawcomputerhelp@central.uh.edu
You must leave the room as it was found. Cleanup and dispose of all trash after your use of the room.
For an event with more than 15 people, your event may require custodial cleanup (vacuuming, trash removal, etc). You will need to coordinate with LawBuildingHelp@Central.UH.EDU, so that a workorder can be submitted for the custodial daily cleaning schedule. If there is a cost for custodial cleanup, your program will be responsible for this cost. This also pertains to large weekend events.
BE SURE the furniture in any reserved room is put back in the same order you found it. Rooms must be returned to their normal room arrangement. If you need assistance with this, arrange help through LawBuildingHelp@Central.UH.EDU or x 32115.
If you arrive at a room to set up for an event, and find the room in bad condition, please contact Robert Gonzalez immediately at 713-829-7795. Failure to put the room back in the same order it was found may result in termination of room reservation privileges.
If you have a “weekend event”, you must submit your request for weekend support as soon as you know or no later than Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. prior to the weekend event to ensure that the room/building will be unlocked. This includes time changes for previously confirmed rooms. We cannot guarantee that the room(s)/building will be unlocked for weekend requests submitted past this deadline. Therefore, requests for weekend events received after this deadline will not be accepted, except on an emergency basis, at which time the requestor will be required to contact LawBuildingHelp@Central.UH.EDU, and place “Emergency Weekend Room Request” in the subject line, and await confirmation from Law Facilities.
For all events/luncheons where food is arranged for faculty, staff or a student organization in the Foundation Room or a classroom, please keep the following in mind: make sure caterers return following the event to pick up chafing dishes, buckets, bowls, platters, insulated bags, etc.
Caterers must enter the building from the loading dock and not the front door of the John M. O’Quinn building. You must make arrangements with LawBuildingHelp@Central.UH.EDU to allow entrance from the back of the building.
Items that are not picked up by the catering company that same day must be taken back to your office, and caterers will pick up items directly from you.
DO NOT leave any catering items in any reserved room or its catering support room, if applicable. If no one wants any remaining items, please dispose of the items.
Allow time for Law Center faculty/staff/students to eat leftover food, and then please throw away any leftovers, and clean up any mess that may be in the room. This will ensure the room is clean, should another event be held in the room later that day. The custodial staff will empty garbage cans later that evening.
NOTE: This also includes the kitchen or catering support area. BE SURE this area is clean (no dishes in the sink, no trash or food items left on the counter, no empty trays laying around, etc.).
Law Center courses take precedence. Your reservation may be cancelled if it conflicts with a Law Center class. This is true even if a Law Center course is added late and needs to make use of a room you previously reserved.
The greatest potential conflict is with the Sheena Courtroom since it is comprised of classrooms 102A and 102B.
Please also consider the level of noise the event may create and how it may affect neighboring classes. Permission to hold reception-like events may not be granted if it will disrupt classes in session.
Room reservations for a future semester for all reservable classrooms (which includes 102A and 102B, and thus 102) are not available in the system until after the Law Center courses for that semester have undergone student registration and classrooms have been assigned. Typically, student registration for the spring semester happens the first week of the prior year’s November. Typically, student registration for the fall semester happens in early April of the same calendar year. If your event is one that suggests an entry in the Law Center Event Calendar, you should enter it there in advance of when a room reservation is made because in the Event Calendar system you can select a room. This room should always correspond to the room you reserve later. The benefit of the Event Calendar entry is that this will “block” later-in-time Event Calendar entries seeking to use the same room in an overlapping fashion. Given that room reservations for rooms are not available until after student registration and classroom assignment for the target semester, please do not count on or plan for using a particular room unless you have made special arrangements directly with the AD office.
If you made an Event Calendar entry but are waiting for the room reservation system to open up the classrooms for the target semester, be sure to reserve the rooms you “claim” in the Event Calendar entry as soon as they are reservable. The AD office will send an email notifying the Law Center community when classroom assignments have been made such that classroom reservations can be made for an academic term. This is typically three to six weeks after student registration.
Although these rules are posted on a public web page, all room reservations are made exclusively by authorized Law Center staff with access to the room reservations system page. One must have authorized credentials to log into this page.
You should always consider whether your room reservation also needs an Event Calendar entry and/or an event planning form entry. Only authorized persons can make an Event Calendar entry; that page is behind a login. If your event is in a Special Permissions Room it is very likely you will need both additional entries. The three systems are separate and each one serves a different purpose. While there is some duplicate entry needed to cover all three systems, that is necessary at this point in time; further integration of the three systems is not possible for the foreseeable future.
You should become familiar with the event planning page because this is how you initially initiate a need for support for an event. Support for an event typically comes from: LawIT; Law Facilities; Marketing; the Dean’s office; and several other parts of the Law Center. If you reserve a classroom or, for example, the Foundation Room (room 101), and you need LawIT and marketing support, you should indicate this when you complete the event planning form. If you do not complete the event planning form, the presumption is that you are holding your meeting or event without support from the groups whose support is requested originally via the event planning form. For example, if you only need a small classroom for a few hours on a Friday afternoon, and if you know how to run the technology in that classroom for your event, and you need no other support, and your event is not one appropriate for the Event Calendar, then a “mere room reservation” may be appropriate without resort to the other two systems. But, instead, if for the same event you needed the Dean to appear, that appearance is requested through the event planning form. Please note, any event requiring the Dean’s appearance will, per the event planning page, need to be submitted at least three months in advance.
Even when indicating the need for support from Law Facilities or LawIT via the event planning form, separate requests must be sent to each of these groups to give the details of the support needed, as described elsewhere in these rules.
During final exam periods there will be no room reservations for events that draw external persons into the building. The building will be sacrosanct during finals. https://www.law.uh.edu/calendar/academic-calendar.asp
Student organizations seeking to reserve rooms must work through the liaison assigned for this purpose within the Office of Student Affairs.
Reservations related to activities or events associated with the Blakely Advocacy Institute (“BAI”) must be entered by BAI staff.