RFPs of the Past
The session began with some history, or an exploration of RFP 1.0 and RFP 2.0. As panelists recalled, in the beginning, RFPs were informal and relationship-driven. Or in other words, many law firm partners reacted to being asked to complete one with an attitude of “How dare you.” As Brosnahan said, “This has come a long way in a short period of time, from something that was offensive and presumptuous to a structured process that happens automatically.” And as Blickstein noted, “Clients were also offended at having to do business this way.”
The next iteration, RFP 2.0, made strides through standardized procurement-driven processes with structured proposals. In reality, law firms were often expected to produce voluminous documentation to answer a host of irrelevant questions. In many cases, that translated to, “I’m publishing an encyclopedia, and you’re going to write it for me.”
According to Winmill, 2.0 represented an expansion. “More companies were doing RFPs, they were doing it for more types of legal services, and they were also involving more people internally,” he said. “I have great empathy for the law firms that filled these things out. They would get RFPs and would often say the questions were inconsistent, they didn’t make sense, they were multipart, and some were just dumb.”
Part of the issue came from RFP questionnaires being written by committee–everyone wanted to weigh in, and every change required consensus. That led to a process that was clumsy and clunky. As Blickstein noted, “Folks don’t often think about the result of that collection of data when asking those questions.”
Looking Ahead to RFP 3.0
Now that the legal industry is past the RFP 2.0 phase, the panel took a look at the future. And right now, the process doesn’t yet match the pace.
When creating RFPs, the situation currently is “one size fits none,” as Brosnahan described it. “You’re asking for input from people that have different offerings, different skills, and different pricing models,” she said. “You want them to level set that in a way that lets you choose from apples and apples. But they may be offering ham. It’s impossible to normalize those things.”
According to Winmill, some companies are better than others when it comes to the RFP process. But many of them still struggle to write relevant, concise RFPs. “I see a lot of kicking of the can down the road in in-house departments,” he said. “It takes a lot of work up front for an in-house legal department to say ‘We’re buying green apples, we’re going to design the RFP for those apples, and we’re going to invite green apples to our RFP. So we’re going to write good questions about green apples.’” He said that approach requires more time than most people have. “So instead they take the template they’ve used before, and they send it to their friends.”
The panelists also noted that a key tautological theme of today’s RFPs requires using AI to draft responses and then drafting responses about the use of AI. But more seriously, the panelists pointed to the ability of AI and centralized data to dramatically increase the speed of drafting responses. However, AI slop is still a major concern.
Being able to easily find information from past RFPs represents a key value driver from AI. “You have a universe of information from past RFPs and experience data,” said Maziarek. “To me, that’s the asset that allows firms to articulate the unique value they can bring to clients in their RFP responses, provided it is curated and leveraged accurately. But the slop part is huge, because we are in the stage where we have a lot of content.”
Grabowski pointed to the expense and time involved in completing RFPs and where AI can help address that challenge. “It’s important to not take everything that comes over the fence. The attorneys that we work with think that since we have these tools, it’s going to be easy now,” he said. “And there is no easy button.” However, better data and AI allow firms to conduct a profitability analysis on the front end and evaluate which RFPs are worth responding to, or which parts of certain RFPs make more strategic sense.
On the client side, the panel pointed to AI as an excellent tool for reviewing both answers to RFPs as well as consolidating questions or eliminating those that aren’t truly necessary.
The panel concluded with a list of dilemmas that remain with RFPs:
- RFPs have matured, are normalized, and are unavoidable
- AI has accelerated proposal production without fixing decision quality
- The real issue is misalignment between what’s asked, what’s answered, and how choices are made