Bid Protests and Procurement Litigation
Related Areas
We serve as national counsel for clients that pursue and defend bid protests of multimillion-dollar state procurements for health, human services, information technology, asset and income verification, fiscal agent, and education services. We also litigate procurement matters in court, in arbitration, and before administrative law judges, and state procurement boards.
Bid Protests
Bid protests move much faster than typical civil litigation. In many cases, only a few weeks separate the filing a protest from an evidentiary hearing, during which time the protesting party is often at an informational disadvantage due to its competitor’s efforts to shield bid material and the agency’s reluctance to share its scoring documents. We have substantial experience in quickly analyzing a procurement for viable protest grounds, filing protests, and leveraging regulations to obtain bid and evaluation materials. And, because our bid protest team consists of trial lawyers, we bring courtroom-honed skills that give our clients the edge in witnesses examinations and oral advocacy at the hearings.
Representative Matters
- When a competitor obtained an ex parte TRO blocking a state agency from contracting with our client for asset and income verification services, we prepared our client for a fast-paced evidentiary hearing to challenge the injunction. After our cross-examination of the competitor’s witnesses, the Court ruled from the bench and summarily dismissed the competitor’s case.
- When our client’s proposal was disqualified as untimely, we obtained a hearing before a state procurement panel and convinced it at the conclusion of oral argument to reverse its own state agency for misconstruing the definition of a calendar day.
- In a two-day evidentiary hearing during which we examined eight adverse witnesses, we convinced the administrative law judge that our client’s competitor had misrepresented its credentials and failed to meet certain procurement requirements, justifying a reversal of the procurement award.
Our clients also rely on us to defend multimillion-dollar state contract awards against bid protests brought by competitors. In several instances, we have defeated the protest on the papers without the need for the time consuming, costly evidentiary hearing sought by the competitor.
Procurement Litigation
We also represent clients in disputes that arise out state procurements. We have substantial experience handling breach of contract claims based on teaming agreements, preliminary agreements, letters of intent, and subcontractor disputes.
Representative matters
- After a 10-day arbitration hearing, we obtained a favorable resolution of our client’s claims against a prime contractor that had attempted to reduce the client’s scope of work unilaterally and misappropriate the client’s existing work. We successfully pursued unconventional claims seeking the enforcement of a preliminary agreement and specific performance, and developed those claims through depositions and examinations of more than a dozen witnesses.
- We obtained the favorable resolution of a multi-year litigation in federal court challenging our client’s termination of a multimillion-dollar subcontractor agreement. We supported our position by obtaining non-public documents from the agency that we used to cross examine the terminated vendor’s witnesses about prior unsatisfactory work, and to obtain testimony from state employees to refute the subcontractor’s claims.