ARxIUM obtains court order overturning Government Accountability Office decision

Client(s) ARxIUM, Inc.

Jones Day successfully represented ARxIUM, Inc., a leading developer and manufacturer of pharmacy automation, workflow, and consulting solutions, in its bid protest before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The protest challenged the actions of the U.S. Department of the Air Force (Air Force), acting through the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), in arbitrarily eliminating ARxIUM from a competition for the procurement of automated pharmacy equipment for four U.S. Air Force Bases. The elimination was part of the agencies’ corrective action as the result of a prior protest brought by a competitor before the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), in which the GAO sustained a protest challenging the agency’s initial award to ARxIUM.

Oral arguments were held in November 2017. In a decision dated February 8, 2018, Judge Wolski of the Court of Federal Claims found that several of the GAO’s findings were unsupported and held that the DLA, Air Force and the GAO all entirely failed to consider several important aspects of the corrective action before the Air Force and DLA eliminated ARxIUM from the competition, rendering the agencies’ actions arbitrary and capricious. In sustaining ARxIUM’s protest, the Court noted that one of the problems in the procurement was the Air Force and DLA’s failure to properly consider the rights the government has in certain data deemed important to performance of the commercial item contracts to be awarded. The court granted ARxIUM’s request for injunctive relief, enjoining the government from proceeding with the award until the identified errors had been corrected.

ARxIUM, Inc. v. United States, No. 17-1407C (Fed. Cl.)