There are many types of technical writers, and one of the most difficult jobs a technical writer might face is preparing solicitations and specifications for a bid request. Imagine you are working for a very large Corporation and you wish to outsource a very important assignment to one of your vendors, so you must make a big proposal solicitation. You must prepare everything in accordance with all the various departments of your company, and everything must be in exact.

Meanwhile, you must also consider all the laws and regulations that your company must comply with to shield you from risk and liability or potential lawsuit. One of the reasons that these solicitations get so large, some of that spanning over 200 pages is because of all the rules and regulations in the way of each facet of the Corporation.

A vendor must comply with all these rules and regulations, as if it were the actual company. Indeed, the company realizes that to comply with all these rules and regulations will cost them a bundle of money. Another reason they outsource. By outsourcing they can push their responsibilities to satisfy all those laws on to the vendor.

But they need it in writing from the vendor that they will comply with all of the specifications in the bid request. When preparing these solicitations specifications you need to consider the following categories;

• Employee Laws
• Risk and Insurance
• Quality of Products and Service
• Complete Price Breakdown
• Environmental Compliance
• Required Equipment
• Training and Certification of Workers
• Dispute Resolutions
• Modifications
• Terms of the Contract
• Terms of Payment and Billing
• Termination of Contract Procedures

Indeed, the technical writer should also consider previous specifications for solicitation and use some of the boilerplate, however they must be very careful in doing so and an attorney should look it over as well. In some companies, it is the attorney that writes the technical bid requests, or at least the legalese part. Please consider all this.