Here's a list of best practices you should know when using Onit RFP:
Using Onit RFP
💡 Best practice tip: Adopt a consistent RFP naming convention (e.g., Practice Area – Matter – FY/Quarter, like "Litigation – Acme Trademark – FY26 Q2") and save your most-used filters. Naming discipline pays off most when you start reporting on RFP volume, cycle time, or savings across a year.
💡 Best practice tip: Always search the directory before creating a new RFP. Duplicates are the most common source of stakeholder confusion — a 30-second search prevents two parallel proposals on the same matter and keeps everyone working from one source of truth.
Starting a New Proposal
💡 Best practice tip: Only enable Reverse Auction when the work is well-scoped, and price is genuinely the deciding factor between qualified firms. For novel or judgment-heavy matters, auctions can pressure firms into bids they can't deliver on. If you do use one, default to Price Ranking Only — showing the lowest bid amount tends to anchor everyone toward the floor and erodes margin for the firm you actually want to win.
💡 Best practice tip: Build the timeline backward from when you need the work to start. Allow 2–3 weeks for vendor response on Matter RFPs (4–6 weeks for Panel RFPs), plus internal review time and an approval buffer. Publishing an RFP with a one-week response window will produce a one-week-quality response.
Defining Scope
💡 Best practice tip: Resist the urge to ask every question you can think of. Aim for 8–15 substantive questions; beyond that, response quality drops sharply and you're effectively penalizing the firms that actually read each one. Every question should map to a scoring dimension — if you wouldn't score it, cut it. Use Sections to group related questions so reviewers can compare answers cleanly across vendors.
💡 Best practice tip: Lock down the pricing structure before publishing — same units, same phases, same required fields for every vendor. If you let firms answer in their preferred format, you'll spend more time normalizing the responses than scoring them. UTBMS phase sets give you the cleanest apples-to-apples comparison.
Inviting Vendors
💡 Best practice tip: Three to five firms is the sweet spot. Fewer than three doesn't create competitive tension; more than six dilutes attention from your top choices and burns goodwill with firms unlikely to win. Confirm the right partner-level contact at each firm — sending to a generic intake address often means the RFP sits unread for a week.
Viewing Proposal Details
💡 Best practice tip: Have each reviewer score independently before any group discussion. The "Reviewers shouldn't see others' feedback before submitting their own" toggle (in Review Rating Setup) exists for exactly this reason — turn it on. Group consensus reached after one senior voice anchors the room is not the same as independent agreement, and the spread between reviewers is often the most useful data point you'll get.
💡 Best practice tip: Use the Negotiation tool to refine — not to re-bid. If you've already run a Reverse Auction, going back for another meaningful price cut signals that the auction wasn't really the final round, and firms will hold back in future RFPs. Reserve post-auction negotiation for tightening scope, clarifying assumptions, or addressing a specific gap (e.g., staffing or fee structure), not for squeezing the headline number again.
💡 Best practice tip: Define and weight your scoring criteria before responses arrive — never after. Document the weights (e.g., 40% price, 30% experience, 20% staffing, 10% diversity) and share them with reviewers up front. Criteria set after seeing the bids almost always reverse-engineer the answer you already wanted, and the audit trail won't survive scrutiny.
RFP Settings (Main)
💡 Best practice tip: Audit Review Dimensions and COI questions at least once a year (more often if your business is changing). Stale dimensions — like a "COVID readiness" question still on the form in 2026 — signal to vendors that the RFP wasn't carefully prepared and undercut the rest of your scoring rigor.
RFP Templates
💡 Best practice tip: Maintain a small, owned set of templates — ideally one per Practice Area for Matter RFPs and one master Panel RFP template. Designate a template owner and require their sign-off on changes. Uncontrolled template proliferation is how teams end up with 14 slightly different litigation templates and no way to compare results across them.
RFP Vendors
💡 Best practice tip: Reconcile your vendor list at least annually — merge duplicates (the same firm often gets added under variant names like "Smith & Jones LLP" and "Smith Jones"), validate jurisdictions, and retire firms you haven't engaged in 2+ years. Convert recurring Unverified Vendors to Verified status so they carry into your analytics correctly.
Users
💡 Best practice tip: Tie user deactivation to your HR offboarding process, not to ad hoc cleanup. Vendor pricing data is sensitive, and ex-employees with lingering access are the most common audit finding in legal ops reviews. Quarterly access reviews are a reasonable backstop between offboarding events.
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