Why we’re taking DemandStar to court

Message from Stephen Hetzel, Co-Founder

Maybe you saw the news. We’re taking DemandStar to court. And, also, Ramsey County in Minnesota (where St. Paul is located).

The reason we’re taking them to court is to ensure that you have fair and fast access to their bid specification documents.

Details of our lawsuit can be read here.

Right up front, I want to reassure you that our bid document service will continue on as always. And, if we prevail in our lawsuit against DemandStar, it’ll contribute to our service working even more reliably for you.

We launched our On Demand Bid Specification research and delivery service in 2015 because we knew how frustrating it could be for our customers to lay hands on the bid documents required to qualify leads.

If you’ve been using the service, you know that it lets you obtain bid documents via fast, easy download or by requesting research assistance (either through your user interface or regular BidPrime email alerts).

In many instances, we give you access to bid documents as soon as the RFPs are released.

For our part, that takes a lot of phone work and emailing—to the tune of tens of thousands of requests each month.

I’m happy to report that we receive great cooperation from nearly all the government agencies to which we reach out. The vast, vast majority of them promptly fulfill our requests (and many go the extra mile by keeping us updated when they issue addendums).

Unfortunately, a small number of agencies make us jump through a lot of hoops before they’ll provide us the requested bid documents—if they’ll even provide them at all. But we’re committed to doing whatever it takes to obtain those materials for you.

You need them, and we’re going to make sure you can have them.

That’s why we're continually streamlining and bolstering our mechanisms to make bid-document requests for you. And it’s why we have an incredible team of dedicated staff with the skillsets and research know-how to as quickly as possible obtain these vital documents.

We see all that as key to keeping our promise to you to keep getting better and keep doing better so that you can enjoy more and greater success in your pursuit of government contracting opportunities.

Our lawsuit against DemandStar and Ramsey County is part-and-parcel to that promise.

As for the case itself, we believe it quite strong and are looking forward to a positive outcome. And we hope you don’t need to know how strong our product is, but we have included a comparison chart in our lawsuit. We included these allegations as part of our effort to prove that DemandStar should not be permitted to bar anyone’s access to public data.

Stephen Hetzel