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'Page-Count' Method Supports Claim For Reimbursement Of Protest Costs

Client Alert | 1 min read | 08.17.06

Despite the agency's blanket objections to almost all of a prevailing protester's claimed costs, the Government Accountability Office ("GAO") in BAE Technical Services, Inc. - Costs , B-296699.3 (Aug. 11, 2006), http://www.gao.gov/decisions/bidpro/2966993.pdf, held that the protester was entitled to recover costs attributed to almost all of the issues raised as they are "largely intertwined parts of [its] basic objection that the [agency] misevaluated proposals and treated offerors unequally." Although the records of the time spent on the protest were not detailed enough to attribute time on an issue-by-issue basis, GAO relied on the application of a "page-count" method to conclude that approximately 94.5 percent of the number of pages in submissions to GAO were devoted to issues related to the meritorious protest allegations.

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Client Alert | 3 min read | 06.12.26

DOJ Guidance Backs Away From Disparate Impact Liability

On June 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a formal opinion concluding that the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission’s (EEOC) existing interpretations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) disparate-impact liability, including the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP), are unconstitutional. According to the opinion, EEOC’s prior interpretations contemplate liability based on disproportionately adverse effects alone, without regard to an employer’s likely intent, rather than treating disparate impact as an evidentiary mechanism to “smoke out” intentional discrimination. DOJ found that this approach functions as a “qualified racial-proportionality mandate” that places “a racial thumb on the scales, often requiring employers to evaluate the racial outcomes of their policies, and to make decisions based on (because of) those racial outcomes.” The opinion fulfills one mandate of Executive Order 14281, which rejected disparate-impact liability insofar as it “creates a near insurmountable presumption that unlawful discrimination exists wherever there are any differences in outcomes among different [demographic groups].”...

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