About

What is the Procurement Lawyers' Association?

The Procurement Lawyers’ Association (or PLA) is an organisation to bring together all procurement lawyers working within the field of EC procurement law (whether private practice or in house, public or private sector, solicitor, barrister or academic, based in the UK or elsewhere). We now have over 350 members and continue to grow.

The PLA is intended to act as a platform to represent, promote and strengthen procurement law expertise. The PLA’s 3 purposes are to provide:

  1. an external collective voice, e.g. in order to respond to consultation exercises;
  2. a forum for in depth discussion and debate about key procurement law issues; and
  3. training and know how.

We formally adopted our Constitution in April 2010 and have an Executive Committee of fifteen.

How the PLA began and what we've achieved to date:

16 September 2008 An initial meeting of interested people took place. Agreement was reached to take the initiative forward by forming a steering group to establish the association.
19 November 2008 The steering group met for the first time to agree the purpose of the association, to establish initial administrative arrangements and to begin planning events
23 January 2009 The PLA’s inaugural full meeting took place with over 70 procurement lawyers in attendance. The meeting included training and question time sessions, as well as discussion about the association, its purpose and next steps

Since then, we have established a number of working groups, prepared papers and responses and held events on a range of topical procurement issues including:

  • A response to the OGC's consultation on implementing the Remedies Directive (December 2009)
  • A paper and event on Public Procurement and Land Development Agreements (September 2009)
  • A paper and event on Issues in Evaluating Public Sector Tenders (June 2010)
  • A response to the European Commission's consultation on Concessions (September 2010) 

The PLA's Working Group Principles are set out on the projects page.

Use these links for further details of the PLA's training and events and current and completed projects.