Public Sector Procurement Editing and Proofreading Services

Public procurement is writing that creates legal obligations the moment it is published. A solicitation document sets the rules of a competition the authority must then follow exactly, and any gap between what the document said and what the evaluators did is the ground on which an unsuccessful bidder challenges the award. The pressure to keep requirements broad and criteria flexible is constant, and it is precisely the flexibility that produces the challenge.

We edit what procurement offices and their client departments produce — requests for proposals, quotations and tenders, invitations to qualify and pre-qualification documents, statements of requirement and scopes of work, evaluation criteria and scoring methodologies, mandatory and rated requirement specifications, terms and conditions and contract templates, bidder question and answer documents and addenda, evaluation reports and award recommendations, regret letters and debriefing material, contract management and performance documentation, procurement policy and directive documents, guidance for departments preparing requirements, and responses to challenges and oversight reviews. Our editors check that everything the authority will rely on when evaluating is actually in the published document.

Evaluation criteria are the provision on which procurements are won, lost and overturned. A criterion asking bidders to "demonstrate their approach to project management" and worth twenty per cent tells bidders nothing about what a high score requires and gives evaluators nothing to defend a differential with. We rewrite these so each criterion states what the evaluators are looking for, what distinguishes an adequate response from a strong one, and the page limit within which it must be made; so mandatory requirements are unambiguously pass or fail and are things a bidder can objectively verify about themselves before bidding; so the weighting is published with the criteria rather than held back; and so nothing appears in the evaluation matrix that was not published to bidders. We also work on regret letters, because a debriefing that explains where a bid scored poorly against published criteria resolves most disputes, and a letter that thanks the bidder for their interest generates the challenge.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including solicitations before posting, bid material and evaluation records. We are editors rather than procurement or legal advisers, and we offer no view on procurement strategy, trade agreement obligations or the defensibility of any process. What we can do is make solicitations internally consistent and criteria capable of being applied and defended.