Government Contracts Insights
Analysis and practical guides on government contracts.
4 articles, checklists, and guides on government contracts law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice—for a specific matter, contact the firm.
Filing or Defending a Bid Protest: A Practical Guide
This guide walks through a bid protest in the order it happens, from the unsuccessful-offeror notice to the recovery of costs, on both sides. It begins with the first twenty-four hours and the calendar that has to be built before anything else, then covers the debriefing, the forum decision, and drafting a protest on very little information. Later steps address the agency report, comments and supplemental grounds, the protective order and what the client will and will not see, hearings and alternative dispute resolution, corrective action, and the decision. Separate steps set out the awardee's defense as intervenor, the Court of Federal Claims variations, size and task order protests, and the protest playbook a company should build before it needs one. A running example follows one contractor through a protest it filed and one it defended.
Bid Protests at GAO and the Court of Federal Claims: Standing, Timeliness, and the Record
A bid protest is federal litigation conducted on a clock measured in days, on a record the agency assembles, in a forum you must choose before you know what happened. This article explains the three forums and how they differ, who has standing to protest, and the timeliness rules that dispose of more protests than the merits ever do. It covers the CICA automatic stay and why the five- and ten-day windows govern the entire strategy, the standard of review and the prejudice requirement, and how a protest is actually decided on a paper record with almost no discovery. It then works through the common protest grounds, the corrective action that resolves most successful protests, the jurisdictional traps for size protests and task orders, and the position of the awardee who intervenes. A running example follows one company through a protest it filed and one it defended.
Bid Protest Toolkit: Protest Grounds, Agency Reports, and Corrective Action
This toolkit supplies the working documents of a bid protest, from the debriefing request sent on day one to the costs claim filed after a sustained decision. It includes a protest calendar that separates the merits deadline from the shorter automatic stay window, a same-day debriefing request letter, a structured debriefing question set, a forum selection matrix, and a catalog of protest grounds ranked by how often they produce relief. It then provides a GAO protest outline, an evaluation comparison table that makes disparate treatment visible, an agency report review protocol, a comments outline, an intervenor filing outline, a corrective action assessment, and a protest costs claim template. A final tool is the one-page playbook a contractor should adopt before the next unsuccessful-offeror notice arrives. Each item is annotated with the failure it prevents.
Bid Protest Checklist: A Practical Checklist
This checklist runs a bid protest by the clock, because the clock is what decides most of them. It opens with the first day—the debriefing request and the one-page calendar that separates the merits deadline from the shorter automatic stay window—then covers debriefing preparation, the standing and timeliness screens, and the forum decision. Later sections cover drafting the protest, the protective order, a working method for reading the agency report, the comments and supplemental protest round, corrective action, and the decision and costs claim. Separate sections give the awardee's intervention checklist, the specialist tracks for size and task order protests, the pre-award protest, and the playbook a contractor should have written before the notice arrives. Every item is written so a "no" tells you what to do next.