PART III

LAWSUITS OVER GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS

The complexity of government contracts is most obvious when a controversy occurs over the contract. For our purposes, a controversy can either be a protest, which is a lawsuit by an unsuccessful vendor trying to get the government contract, or a claim, which is typically a lawsuit by a government contractor attempting to get more money out of the government.

These procurement lawsuits are much more complex than the typical lawsuit. Chapter 9 seeks to prove this. We start out by discussing what a typical lawsuit looks like and how a typical lawsuit gets resolved. We then review a typical federal lawsuit and describe how much more complex they are. Finally, the chapter examines the typical procurement lawsuits: protests and claims.

In chapter 10, we look more carefully at protests, reviewing the “what,” “when,” and “how” of protests before GAO and the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (COFC).

In chapter 11, we examine claims more closely, again from a “what,” “when,” and “how” perspective of claims before boards of contract appeals (BCAs) and the COFC.

And finally, in chapter 12, we discuss how the government might end up paying for the costs of protests and claims. While the government may lose a lawsuit, that’s no guarantee that the government will pay litigation costs. As long as the government submits a good argument in a losing lawsuit, it will not pay for them.