Sections L & M: What Do They Mean?

To tell you what “Sections L and M” mean, I need to give you a little background. It used to be that Contracting Officers (COs) were required to use the Uniform Contract Format (UCF) (48 CFR 14.204-1) for every federal solicitation. It makes each solicitation and resultant contract structured in the same way, no matter which agency issues the solicitation. It still is required for open market solicitations and contract awards over $100,000, with a few exceptions.

I love the UCF. If you are looking for what supplies or services are being purchased under the contract, and their cost or price, you look in Section B. Want to know where things are to be delivered and when? Check Section F, Deliveries or Performance. Special security requirements? That would be in Section H. You could pick up a solicitation issued by the General Services Administration (GSA), the Veterans Administration (VA), or any part of the Department of Defense, and it would be organized exactly the same way. Check out the table titled, “Uniform Contract Format” to see the breakout of every solicitation under the UCF. Once the solicitation is awarded, Sections A – J form the contract, while the offeror’s completed Section K is usually incorporated by reference into the contract.

So now you know where the terms “Section L & M” come from. Section L, Instructions to Offerors, describes in detail the requirements for proposal submittal for that procurement. The instructions may be very detailed specifying exactly how the proposal is to be structured, the page limits, font sizes, line spacing and margins, as well as what information should be in each volume, and even the naming convention for digital files. Stray outside these instructions and you are apt to get your proposal excluded from even being considered for evaluation. Think I’m kidding? We have a client (a large, well known federal contractor) who came to us to help them with their proposal compliance issues since their proposal for a $50 million effort had been thrown out without even being evaluated because they had failed to double-space their text!

Section M, Evaluation Criteria, describes how the government will evaluate each proposal. It should tell you what is most important to the agency for that procurement, the system that the government will use to conduct the evaluation (e.g., colors, adjectival ratings, and points), and what priority it gives to each factor (e.g., factors are shown in descending order of importance; or technical is more important than past performance which is more important than the subcontracting plan). And it should also specify the relative importance of the non-price evaluation factors to the overall evaluated cost or price. So, while Section L might give you specific instructions for the structure of the proposal, section M tells you whether this is a good procurement for you to pursue (it plays to your company’s strengths) or not (it’s heavily weighted toward past performance and you have average, minimal past performance compared to your competitors). It also tells you where to expend most of your proposal time and resources in clearly demonstrating the reasons why the government should select your proposal for award.

Almost every small business I have helped with managing and writing a competitive proposal thinks that the most important part of the solicitation is Section C, Statement of Work/Performance Work Statement. That’s where they are most comfortable because it describes what the government wants to purchase. But I can tell you from experience that reading Sections L and M in minute detail, asking the government for clarifications when the instructions or evaluation criteria conflict or are not clear, and gaining a thorough understanding of the requirements of these two sections is absolutely essential to winning a competitive contract.