First Law

Councils conduct joint tender

Added Tuesday 25th July 2006

Halton, Knowsley, Sefton and West Lancashire Councils are jointly conducting a competitive tender process to appoint external legal advisers to act as partners and advisers to support their in-house teams. Work will be put out externally to meet the Councils’ requirements that cannot currently be met in-house either by capacity (including illness, maternity leave and workload peaks) or expertise. Applications from smaller firms with offices convenient to each Council’s headquarters are welcome.

The main benefits of a collaborative approach of this kind are that the costs of running the tender are shared, the Councils are able to wield greater collective bargaining power and there is conformity of approach, in terms of billing procedures, service standards, resolving disputes, use of counsel, compilation of billing data for future benchmarking and the creation of a robust audit trail to demonstrate the achievement of best value.

The Councils are also looking to achieve a number of other benefits from this collaborative working such as training opportunities and skills transfer.

First Law is managing the tender by co-ordinating the drafting of the tender documentation and organising communications generally. By drawing on its know-how and market information gained from hundreds of previous tenders, First Law is able to administer the process fairly, efficiently and cost effectively.

Law firms that participate in the tender will only be required to supply key information in a single tender submission stage that will allow smaller local firms to compete on a level playing field with larger firms and the Councils will be able to evaluate tenders using a sophisticated system that produces a percentage score for each participant, covering the full range of assessment criteria. These scores make it quick and easy to undertake exact like-for-like comparisons between competitors.