David v. Goliath Government Contracting Series

Size and Status Protest Episode

Joseph:
All right. We've got a few more people funneling in, but we'll go ahead and get started because we want to be respectful of everyone's time. We sent out an invite, or rather a reminder, about an hour before the 10:00 Mountain Time, about an hour before this kicked off with some instructions, so hopefully, I know I got some feedback on the last one that some people had some difficulty getting into the room. Hopefully those technological issues have been worked out. So I'm going to kick it off.

Joseph:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another version of David versus Goliath, and 10 weapons small businesses and general councils need to win. If this is your first webinar with us, welcome. If you have joined us before, we are flattered and welcome back.

Joseph:
Today, we're going to start the first of what will be a multi-part series in post award bid protest. Specifically, we're going to be covering size standard protest and socioeconomic status protests. Both are governed by the Small Business Administration or SBA, and both must be submitted within a very limited timeframe. With me today is [Dani Terolli 00:01:03], she is one of our associate attorneys in our firm, and has moderated all of our previous webinars. The structure of today's webinar will be primarily a Q & A. The questions are the variety that we regularly get from clients and from prospective clients on what to do immediately following the award of a contract or the government's notice of potential award. These types of questions usually creep in when you, as the disappointed offer, are convinced that the awardee either does qualify because it is too large, or because it doesn't meet within the socio-economic set-aside criteria.

Joseph:
The time today will be split with the first 20 minutes of question and answer being between Dani and me, and we will try to reserve the last 10 minutes to answer questions that you, as the audience, may have, and there should be a Q & A button on your screen. You can submit questions that way, and then of course we'll moderate, Dani will moderate those and we'll have an opportunity to touch on those. A few of you have already started to send chats. All right, and Tom is in the background and he will be helping you guys with any technical issues or any questions. If I'm not speaking up loudly enough, just let us know through the chat, and I'll try to adjust.

Joseph:
All right. So without further ado, I'll let Dani shoot the first question, and that be the last thing I read today.

Dani:
Thanks Joe, so I guess to get us started, why don't you tell the audience what a side standard protest actually is.

Joseph:
All right. So a side standard protest to the nerds in the room, like myself, will sound a little self-explanatory. So I believe that most people, most of the companies represented on today's meeting are small businesses. You hear that term thrown around a lot in the media, but small business hat is a defined term by the Small Business Administration. The easiest way for me to present that is our law firm, and they're all controlled by NAICS codes. So our law firm's NAICS code is 54000, office of attorneys. The size standard for office of attorneys, I believe as the most recent publication of the SBA size standards, is $12 million. And that is $12 million as per year, as demonstrated by literally the very top line revenue receipts of your company as average over the last three or five years. And when I say three or five years, the SBA recently promulgated rules that allowed owners or companies to pick either three or five years, depending on what is the most advantageous to that company.