Requests for Proposals (RFPs) solicit bids for potential business required by an enterprise or government entity. If your business is in the legal space, you’re in luck! Your legal team can take advantage of many opportunities and earn a lot of business. Now more than ever, law firms and Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) receive more legal RFPs to drum up new work. Responding to RFPs or RFIs can secure great opportunities to sustain your business for years. Additionally, government contracts are a great way to legitimize your business further.
When bidding in the legal business, no man is above the law– and no man is below an RFP.
I [Do Not] Object… to an RFP!
Nowadays, more and more corporate legal teams are taking strides to reduce their number of panel firms, which is a panel of preferred law firms, and replacing them with the RFP process to determine who makes the cut to handle their outside legal work. This also allows legal teams to see if a better value is available and to test the market. Legal RFPs are lucrative to law firms because they grow businesses and increase their market share. It has also been proven that your chances of winning these bids increase if you write RFPs with your clients.
Potential Sites to Search for Public Legal RFPs
Bid search engines: Harness the power of bid search engines to find the perfect legal RFP. Custom features, search filters, and relevancy of results may vary. So, make sure to use a frequently updated bid search engine to find new opportunities. We suggest Bid Banana, The Bid Lab’s own user-friendly RFP search engine. With Bid Banana, users can access and search over 25,000+ local, state, and federal RFPs in all 50 US states. Baked-in features, like generative AI, help users extract hidden information from thousands of pages of documents. And, with Bid Banana’s personalized bidding assistant, users can unlock a new level of powerful search features. Need proactive email notifications for new bids matching your saved legal services searches? You’ve got it. With human consultants available to help if needed, Bid Banana is the ultimate RFP search engine.
Sam.gov: Consider the official US federal government procurement site your new best friend. At Sam.gov, lawyers and attorneys can find plenty of legal RFPs from government agencies. Legal RFPs are available for all kinds of legal services. Law services, legal support, lawsuit litigation, legal counseling, and other legal support bids– no matter your niche, there are solicitation opportunities that are ripe for bidding! Additionally, Sam.gov offers free e-mail alerts and daily bid notifications.
Individual state procurement sites: Don’t forget to visit individual state procurement sites. State and local government sites offer many opportunities to expand your legal services in specific areas, markets, and regions.
Professional procurement services: Finally, professional procurement and RFP management businesses provide niche services to help find, build, or create the perfect legal RFP response. May we suggest our Bid Finder service? Our dedicated human experts can help you search, find, and present bidding opportunities. Professional procurement services find relevant bids from both public and private bid databases.
Legal Services RFPs: A Case Study by The Bid Lab
The Bid Lab knows a thing or two about bidding in the legal services industry. When The Colorado Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel (ORPC) reached out looking for legal RFPs, they turned to the RFP experts at The Bid Lab for help.
The ORPC is an independent Colorado state legal advocacy agency. Established in 2016, the organization advocates for family-centered policies. The ORPC recruits and trains attorneys to help promote systemic equity for Colorado families. However, as operations scaled, the ORPC outgrew its software system configurations.
The ORPC needed an operational system to help them continue to provide accountability, training, and resources for families and their legal advocates. However, they did not have the existing resources to procure this vendor independently.
That’s when they decided to ask The Bid Lab for procurement assistance.
After bringing ORPC stakeholders together and plotting a procurement timeline, The Bid Lab’s procurement experts went to work. We helped the ORPC team develop a Request for Information (RFI) to conduct vendor research. With input from stakeholder interviews, The Bid Lab helped the ORPC draft and release a legal RFP that was compliant, comprehensive, and within the organization’s guidelines.
After a highly successful pre-proposal conference, which attracted some of the biggest names in technology, The Bid Lab continued to help the ORPC navigate the legal RFP solicitation process. The Bid Lab also developed next-round bid evaluation scorecards and guidelines for the ORPC. Once the evaluation committee completed its reviews, The Bid Lab held vendor demos before finally assisting ORPC with the winning vendor’s contract negotiations.
The result? A perfectly plotted legal RFP, from start to finish. The Bid Lab connected the ORPC with a vendor who could complete the project ahead of schedule and within their budget. Read the case study for yourself!
Interesting Facts About the Legal Industry
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 1.3 million lawyers were employed in the United States in 2020. How much does a US lawyer make? Well, as of May 2020, lawyers earned a median annual wage of $126,930.
In terms of legal services procurement, FindRFP reports that there were over 2,000 legal services bids and contracts posted by federal, state, and local governments in the United States in 2021,
I Discovered the Law Again
Winning an RFP to be selected as panel counsel can potentially guarantee most, if not all, of a company’s outside legal work. Utilizing RFPs in the legal realm can save time and money on both sides of the process. Additionally, this allows everyone to avoid unnecessary negotiations and get straight to the bidding process. It is also important to be able to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Utilizing the resources available can get you ahead and make bidding worthwhile in the legal industry. The Bid Lab and its various services, such as Bid Banana and Bid Finder, are excellent resources for starting or revamping your bidding journey. You have the intelligence of AI and dedicated experts working in your corner when using The Bid Lab's services. So, make the most out of your options in the legal industry to generate steady business and put The Bid Lab in your corner.
Happy bidding!