Procurement and contracting

Legal and related expertise: Your project may involve the need for:

• advice on procurement approaches or probity issues
• assistance with drafting your notice of procurement or sense-checking your evaluation process
• assistance with legal and related aspects of evaluation 
• assessing and mitigating risk that arises during the procurement process, or
• contract drafting and negotiation and all that that entails.

I've been working on such matters for 18+ years, across a broad range of subject matter and with wide-ranging experience in ICT-related projects.

In-house and external experience: I've advised clients on all sizes of projects as an in-house lawyer and as an external lawyer. I understand internal dynamics, tensions, and drivers, I'm well-versed with in the different industry approaches, and I hit the ground running. 

Commitment: If I agree to take on a job for you, I'll be committed to its successful resolution. It won't be palmed off to junior staff with insufficient experience, I won't take on other matters if doing so would prejudice my availability to you, and if further resource is required I can access other highly skilled lawyers within the Interwoven Law alliance.   

I've been practising law since 1996 and working in these areas since the end of 2006, in a mix of in-house and external legal roles (prior to that I was a litigation lawyer). During this time I've been deeply involved in a wide range of projects and across a wide range of products, services, and solutions, including:

• advising and assisting with procurement, contract drafting and negotiation for a wide range of cross-government collaborative contracts and their related inter-agency MOUs
• retrofitting two large waterfall-style IT contracts with an agile development schedule
• advising on a wide range of procurement and contracting matters in relation to authentication and identify verification services and secure email services
• drafting a technology services agreement for provision of an online marketplace solution
• advising on procurement issues and drafting terms for suppliers and agencies participating in an online marketplace
• amending a departmental procurement policy to accommodate the Government Rules of Sourcing
• assisting with drafting an RFI and RFP and and advising on related procurement issues for a replacement trading system of national significance
• drafting a technology services agreement for the migration of a large number of websites
• drafting panel agreements for expert geological services
• drafting a suite of MOUs for one department’s provision of a wide range of services to two others
• advising on RFPs and drafting agreements for secure web portal and technology testing services
• drafting common capability agreements for web services and security and related services panels
• drafting an MOU/agreement that facilitates agency adoption of a certain technology
• drafting an agreement for accreditation services
• drafting (along with another member of Interwoven Law) a replacement suite of contract templates for a government department
• drafting a Master Services Agreement and SOWs for the implementation and operation of an online course delivery platform for a government agency
• drafting a Master Services Agreement and assisting with the drafting of SOWs for the development and implementation of an online indexation tool for environmental purposes
• drafting an inter-agency agreement governing use of a data analytics platform
• advising on a digital job fairs contract
• drafting and advising on API terms of use
• advising on payroll procurement issues
• advising on technology-related IP transfer issues
• drafting the contractual documentation required to deal with shared services, information sharing, and a range of other matters when functions were transferred from one department to another
• drafting the kind of documentation referred to above for two subsequent transfers of functions from transferor departments to transferee departments
• assisting in the negotiation of an agreement with an offshore provider for a department's use of a cloud-based correspondence generation platform
• drafting and negotiation of Master Services Agreements for a panel of IT architectural service providers
• drafting a comprehensive set of privacy clauses for a Crown entity that needed to update a wide range of its public-facing contracts
• advising a Crown entity on the contractual arrangements for transitioning a mission-critical enterprise-wide system  from its on-premise solution to an offshore cloud-based solution
• drafting and negotiating an agreement for online training solution to be used nationally.

As a sole practitioner, for many of these projects I have provided all legal inputs. At the same time, as a member of the Interwoven Law alliance, I can tap into colleagues' complimentary expertise when needed and form teams with them for projects requiring more lawyers on deck. 

I'm a firm believer in using technology to accelerate and improve the quality and consistency of contracting through automation, so much so that I developed the Contract Foundry, a service to help public sector agencies get contracts in place quickly and without the usual pain and cost. The Contract Foundry has these contract builders, with more planned:

• Master Services Agreement builder (supporting single and panel supply arrangements and with a range of optional SOW templates)
• Government Model Contract for Services or Goods and Services builder (with options for it to operate as a form of MSA, with SOW templates for additional services and ongoing support)
• Mutual Confidentiality Agreement builder
• Inter-agency MOU builder
• Information Sharing MOU builder
• Data Sharing MOU builder
• Letter of variation builder
• Website terms of use builder
• Privacy statement builder
• Privacy clause builder.

When one of these builders can be used for a client matter, the drafting speed and time to contract signing can be phenomenal compared to orthodox processes. In recent times they have been used to prepare:

• MSAs for a panel of service providers
• a sample draft MSA and GMC to enable the client to pick between them, and
• a full GMC that operates as a form of MSA together with ongoing support arrangements. 

In each case, draft contracts were prepared at pace, reducing costs for the clients and accelerating contract signing.

The Contract Foundry also has a knowledge base of questions and answers relating to public sector contracting, and a clause library for rapid insertion of clauses required in particular contexts. Current public sector clients can get free access to these. 

If you'd like to ask a quick question or talk through a potential project, then please get in touch. I'd be happy to help and we can jump on Zoom or Teams if that makes things easier.