Teaming Agreements for the 21st Century

Everyone involved in government contracting is familiar with teaming agreements, which, according to the OED, originated back in the 1970s (or at least the name did).  For many organizations, teaming agreements are form documents that never change, either because they are something the organization has always done, or the organization lacks the bargaining power to change the teaming agreement they’ve been handed.

Making this situation worse is that many teaming agreements are unenforceable in Virginia, the home of a significant number of government contractors.

So why deal with teaming agreements at all?  Modern government contracting continues to get more complex and fewer companies can respond to solicitations without a team.  At the same time, government policy is to increase small business participation.  Teams are a must, and there has to be some type of governing document (we’ve seen plenty of horror stories even with enforceable teaming agreements).  All members of a team are likely to spend significant resources developing a proposal, and few organizations will do so without the potential to get work out of the process.  Hence, teaming agreements.

So, if we are going to do these things, we should do them right.  They need to be enforceable and they need to be effective.  Easy to say, much harder to do.

In the next couple of blog posts, I’m going to include strategies to ensure that your teaming agreements are enforceable.  I’m also going to address some of the lessons we’ve learned about what happens when teaming agreements go wrong and how to prevent those kinds of issues.  Finally, I’m going to talk about how large businesses use their significant bargaining power to push small businesses into compliance problems and how to avoid that trap.

Of course, if you are negotiating a teaming agreement now, you can’t wait for future blog posts.  Reach out now to our expert teaming agreement attorneys so we can discuss how to do this right.