What a Tender Actually Is (No, Not the Chicken Kind)
I have been reading The Death of BigLaw by Ben Weinberger and finding it completely absorbing, the kind of book you end up photographing in pieces and posting to your IG stories because you cannot keep it to yourself. Somewhere in that flurry I dropped a throwaway line about panel tenders, the sort of thing I forgot that not everyone in legal just absorbs by osmosis.
Then the DM arrived, as it always does, to remind me of that fact.
A law student paralegal in a big firm, currently helping on a tender, with no real context and no idea what the thing they are working on actually is. Which is fair, because nobody ever sits the juniors down and explains it. You get handed a section to format at 6pm and you nod along like you understand the machine you are feeding.
So let me break it down, career big sis style.
First, what it is not
A tender has nothing to do with chicken. I know, I was disappointed too.
A tender, in the law firm sense, is business development. It is part of the structure of how firms win work and it is one of the bigger, more formal ways they do it. Think of it as Shark Tank for law firms, except instead of walking into a room and pitching a panel of investors in person, you send a heap of documents in response to a request the client has put out to the market.
That request is called a request for tender, or an RFT. A company or a government department decides it needs outside legal help across a category of work and rather than ringing around, it publishes a brief and invites firms to respond. Every firm that wants the work prepares a submission. The client reads them, scores them and decides who makes it onto the panel, which is the shortlist of firms approved to do that work for a set period.
What the client actually asks for
The RFT asks for a lot. Updates on the firm, who the partners are, what technology the firm is running. Then the things that increasingly matter to certain sections of the general counsel community on the buying side, diversity and inclusion, ESG, gender diversity at the equity partner level and equitable briefing.
That last one is worth pausing on. Years ago I heard Carmel Mulhern speak at an Association of Corporate Counsel conference, back when she was general counsel at Telstra. She talked about requiring the firms on her panel to report the gender split in their barrister briefing, actual percentages, in writing. This was the better part of a decade ago. I thought it was brilliant then and I think it is brilliant now. Quotas are a genuinely contested topic and reasonable people land in different places on them, but what struck me was the principle and the use of position. She had real buying power and she pointed it at something structural. That is leadership.
Then, of course, there is the money, which is what most of it quietly comes down to.
What is the hourly rate. Whether it is a blended rate or a fixed fee. Beyond the rate card, what sweeteners can the firm offer to tip the decision. Access to the firm's library and precedent templates. CPD points and training for the in-house team. The unlimited dial a friend arrangement, where the in-house lawyers can call and talk something through without a meter running (I always loved that one). There are some genuinely creative offers in this space and that is half the fun of reading a stack of submissions.
Style versus substance
When I was in house at the airport and we went to tender, one of the big firms sent their submission wrapped beautifully in an airport and travel theme. It arrived looking like a little mini suitcase, complete with a passport. Hand delivered. It was, objectively, chefs kiss.
They did not get on the panel.
So, style versus substance. The packaging was a ten and I still think about it years later, which tells you it was good marketing, but the general counsel clearly had other priorities when it came to the actual decision. Both things can be true. The effort was beautiful and the substance is what bought the seat.
What the buying side is really weighing
This is where the book I am reading lines up neatly with the tender process, because the whole back half of it reads like the corporate client's playbook. How to read a rate card. What the red flags are in a bill. Which alternative fee arrangements actually shift risk in your favour.
General counsel are not buying technical excellence in isolation. They are buying commercial judgment, responsiveness and a team that understands the business well enough to give an answer, not a memo.
Everything I have written about what GCs want from the lawyers they hire applies just as much to the firms they appoint. They can smell a firm pitching prestige rather than partnership, the same way they can smell a candidate running from billable hours rather than toward the work.
The panel decision is really a bet on who will make their life easier when something goes wrong at 9pm on a Friday and the CEO has slacked you “hey, call me asap”. shudders
A recent realisation
A tender is almost certainly not the most efficient way to match legal services with the corporates who need them. It is enormously time consuming, it runs on roughly a three year cycle in a lot of places and it asks firms to pour days into documents for an outcome that is only ever the chance to compete. Getting on the panel does not typically get you the work. It gets you permission to be considered for the work. The actual matters still go to whichever firm stayed top of mind, which means the business development never really stops.
I would love to see someone rethink this. The matchmaking problem is real, the current ritual feels like a relic and I am genuinely curious whether anyone is building a better way to connect the right legal work with the right provider. If that is you, let’s chat!.
What to take from it if you are the one formatting at 6pm
You are not just doing admin. You are watching how the firm sells itself, which is a part of the business most lawyers never see until they are the partner being asked to win the work themselves.
So pay attention. Notice what the client asked for and what the firm chose to lead with. Notice the gap between the suitcase and the substance. Notice that the money section is where the real negotiation lives. This is the commercial engine of the firm running in front of you and understanding it early is worth far more than the formatting ever will be.
One honest caveat, because a career big sis does not pretend. I have never sat on the business development side of a firm and as a junior in private practice, my involvement in tenders was limited to formatting. I have lived this mostly from the buying side, as the in-house lawyer reading the submissions. If you work in BD and I have missed nuance, I want to hear it. Consider this the version that gets you oriented, not the final word.
Shark Tank for law firms. Big, juicy, somewhat guaranteed revenue on the line and a little passport made of heavy cardstock that really was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
Mel
