Vedder Price is pleased to announce that it has obtained a significant win in a pre-award bid protest of the Chief Information Officer Solutions and Partners 4 (CIO-SP4) Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC), a high-profile federal procurement worth nearly $50 billion. 

Managed by the National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), CIO-SP4 promises to be a prominent contract vehicle for federal agencies to purchase complex information technology services from pre-vetted contractors, and the U.S. Government anticipates making approximately 400 contract awards.  However, the CIO-SP4 solicitation has been plagued by problems since its release over a year ago, with many contractors harboring concerns over the fairness of the requirements and evaluation terms. 

Faced with this issue, the Vedder Price team filed an agency-level protest on behalf of its client to challenge the terms of the solicitation.  The firm also successfully challenged the eleventh hour interpretation the agency intended to use in scoring offerors’ contractual experiences.  In response to the Vedder Price protest, the agency took corrective action, advising that it intended to issue an amendment to the solicitation confirming that the cutoff date it would use to evaluate offerors was the one Vedder Price advocated for—the one best for Vedder Price’s client.

“Going directly to the agency, rather than filing a more formal protest, just made sense at this stage,” said Kelly Buroker, a shareholder in Vedder Price’s Government Contracts practice group.  “It allowed us to work more collaboratively with the agency to efficiently and effectively advocate for an outcome that our client believed was most fair.  We are thrilled with the success of the protest and are hopeful that the agency will be able to move forward in the procurement and make an award to our client.”  

The bid protest was filed by Kevin P. Connelly, Kelly E. Buroker and Tamara Droubi.