Search this and the first page is CACI and Lockheed Martin announcing prime awards, plus law firms explaining how teaming goes wrong. Nobody is writing for the prime who needs a sub.

Primes do not subcontract litigation support because they want to. They subcontract it because a solicitation asks for a capability they do not hold, a volume they cannot absorb, or a small business participation number they have to meet.

We are a litigation support subcontractor for exactly those three reasons, and we are straightforward about which one we are solving.

What a prime is actually buying from a sub

• A capability gap filled — high-volume scanning and indexing, certified translation, forensic collection, or demonstratives, where standing it up in house for one task order makes no sense
• Surge absorption without a hiring cycle
• Small business participation that survives scrutiny, because the sub does real scope rather than passing paper
• Past performance the prime can cite — ours is quantified and we will put it in writing for your proposal

What agency contracts demand of a sub, specifically

The Department of Justice’s Mega 3 statement of work for automated litigation support, dated 1 June 2007, is still the clearest published picture of what this work is held to. It is old, so read it as a benchmark rather than as current terms, but the shape has not changed.

On subcontractors it is explicit. The contractor must acquire and manage subcontracted services as needed, must manage subcontractors including obtaining Government approval for their use, and an offeror using a subcontractor for scanning had to submit a sample CD for each one. A prime cannot quietly swap in a sub, and the sub has to be able to pass a technical sample on its own.

On quality the thresholds are absolute rather than sampled. Numbering must be performed with 100 percent accuracy. File level indices shall be 100 percent accurate to the file information available to the indexers. File and document integrity and order must be maintained to a level of 100 percent accuracy. And work failing to meet these standards shall be rejected.

On volume it contemplated a maximum required throughput of 300,000 pages organized, prepared and indexed at a file level per day, up to 2,000,000 images in any given one-week period, with delivery within three business days of source documents being made available, and availability within a maximum of three working days after issuance of a task order.

A sub that cannot speak to those numbers has not read what it is bidding into.

Where teaming goes wrong

Three failures account for most of it. The sub’s deliverable does not match the prime’s format, so the prime reworks it and the margin disappears. The sub’s reporting cadence does not match the prime’s obligation to the COR, so the prime chases status. Or the scope was never written down, and the question of who owns a QC failure gets settled after it happens.

We fix all three the same way: the format, the cadence and the scope split go in writing before work starts, in the prime’s terms rather than ours.

What we are not

We do not prime a task order and then subcontract the whole of it. We do the work we are teamed for. We also hold no GSA Schedule, so if your capture plan depends on buying through one, we are not the route — say so early and we will tell you whether there is another path rather than wasting a cycle.

We would rather lose a teaming conversation in week one than in month four.

What we do

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. works as a litigation support subcontractor to primes on federal, state and local contracts — filling capability gaps, absorbing surge, carrying real small business participation scope, and delivering in the prime’s format on the prime’s reporting cadence.

Small business, minority-owned, SAM registered, Arlington Virginia. We also prime our own work, which is where our past performance comes from.

Related: government litigation support contractor, small business litigation support vendor, litigation support for government agencies, government document digitization, agency SOP compliance eDiscovery, federal agency eDiscovery services, production specification compliance.

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. teams with primes from Arlington, Virginia, on work for agencies in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia and nationwide.

Bidding something that needs a capability or a participation number? Send us the relevant SOW sections and the format you deliver in. We will tell you in one call whether we fit. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com