Law360 named Covington a Government Contracts Practice Group of the Year, and the accompanying profile included commentary from Jen Plitsch, Jay Carey, and Scott Freling about Covington’s expertise in the government contracts space.
Scott explains that the firm’s government contracts work is “representative of really the true strength and differentiation of our practice here in Covington in that clients come to us with really difficult, challenging, significant matters, and it requires us to come together as a collective team. Whether it's a team made up of just our government contracts colleagues, or quite often also a team that extends to the larger firm that taps upon the resources of other practice areas, we work seamlessly across practices.”
Jay highlighted an example of this work ethic in action in a matter involving Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.'s 160-page protest filed in response to Bell Textron's award that included deeply technical arguments. Jay discussed the procurement’s complexity and why Covington is a top choice for government contracts matters.
“They raised a lot of issues, a lot of very complicated issues, both from a legal perspective and then also from a very technical engineering perspective. Our job was to dive into that and really understand not only the arguments that Sikorsky was making, but understand the underlying technical issues, which we had to do in a very short time frame, and we had just a terrific team here that did that,” Jay said.
Speaking to the practice group’s growth over time to meet the needs of the industry, Jen added that “Covington doesn't really do anything without thinking it out. That's one of our strengths. We identified what we needed to cover everything and to be able to handle multiple large-scale matters at the same time when our clients have needs. We probably still have a little bit of growing to do, but we're pretty close to the right size to cover everything that clients might need.”
In addition to the public wins for clients, Jen said many of its practice group's success stories have to be kept confidential. Those include regulatory and investigations work that she also considers accomplishments for the team.
“We've had great unsung successes in keeping our clients out of enforcement actions and keeping them on the right side of some very complicated legal issues. That's always a victory for us,” Jen said.
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