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Alex Major

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Mr. Major is a partner and co-leader of the firm’s Government Contracts & Export Controls Practice Group. Mr. Major focuses his practice on federal procurement, cybersecurity liability and risk management, and litigation. A prolific author and thought leader in the area of cybersecurity, his professional experience involves a wide variety of litigation and counseling matters dealing with procurement laws and federal regulations and standards . His diverse experience includes complex litigation in federal court under the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act and bid protest actions. He counsels all sizes of companies on issues relating to compliance with government regulations including, among other things, cybersecurity (NIST, FIPS, FedRAMP, and DFARS) requirements, multiple award schedule compliance, Section 508 issues, country of origin requirements under the Buy American and Trade Agreements Acts, cost accounting, and small business requirements. He also regularly conducts internal investigations to assist companies ensure that they are in full compliance with the law.

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On August 8, 2016, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) promulgated an Open Source Software (“OSS”) policy via the Memorandum for the Heads of Departments and Agencies, M-16-21 (“Memorandum” or “M-16-21”). The high-level purposes of the Memorandum are to promote reuse of federal contractor and employee custom-developed code, and to improve the quality of such software through public participation. To these ends, the Memorandum has two major directives: (1) all custom-developed code must be broadly available for reuse across the federal government subject to limited exceptions (e.g., for national security and defense) and (2) under a three-year pilot program, federal agencies are required to release at least 20% of their custom-developed code to the public as OSS. The intent here is to enable continual quality improvements to the code as a result of broader public community efforts. As discussed below, the requirement to release custom-developed code as OSS may effectively reduce the creator’s ownership rights, and have economic impacts on both the value of ownership and pricing when bidding on government contracts.
Continue Reading U.S. Government Open Source Software: OMB’s Memorandum on Federal Source Code Policy Exposes IP Ownership Risk

New FAR Rules and U.S. Department of Labor Guidance Implement the Long-Anticipated (and Much-Dreaded) Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order

Burdensome disclosure obligations, pay transparency, and other affirmative requirements as a condition of doing business with the federal government continue. Sound familiar? The trend continues with new Federal Acquisition Regulation (“FAR”) rules and accompanying U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) guidance issued on August 25, 2016, implementing the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order. In a nutshell – boiling down over 800 pages of rulemaking materials – the rules will soon require:Continue Reading Federal Contractors and Subcontractors Subject to yet More Mandatory Disclosure Requirements

The late, great Yogi Berra once said that “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” Sometimes it seems as if Yogi’s logic is equally applicable to the claims process in the world of Government contracting, where 90 percent of the early battle is following the correct claim initiation procedures prescribed by the Contract Disputes Act (“CDA”), 41 U.S.C. §§ 7101-7109.
Continue Reading Government Contractors Can Learn From Yogi Berra: Failure to Follow Correct Claim Submission Procedures Results in Jurisdictional Doom