Most competitive mandates for Nigerian law firms are not lost on legal ability. They are lost on paper: a tax clearance certificate that expired the week before the deadline, a CV that does not show the years of PPP experience the notice asked for, a methodology that answers a different question from the terms of reference, a page limit quietly exceeded. Procurement panels in Nigeria and at the development finance institutions apply their criteria literally. An expression of interest that is strong on substance and weak on compliance is, in practice, a weak expression of interest.
Meridian Submission Intelligence is built for that gap. It allows a law firm to upload a completed submission and receive an advisory assessment against the opportunity’s own evaluation criteria before the document leaves the building.
How the assessment works
A firm signed in on the Firm membership uploads its completed submission as a PDF or Word (DOCX) file of up to 15MB, and links it to the relevant notice. Where the notice is on Meridian Mandate Watch, its published scope, eligibility requirements and evaluation criteria are attached automatically. Where it is not, the firm pastes the criteria from the RFP or terms of reference, with weights if the issuer published them.
The document is then assessed in a background queue, one submission at a time, against those criteria. The assessment reads the submission itself: every finding is tied to a page number in a PDF or a paragraph number in a Word file, so a partner can go straight to the passage in question.
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What the report contains
- An overall score out of 100, calculated as the weighted average of the category scores shown in the report, so the arithmetic can be checked line by line.
- Category scores with their weights: by default eligibility and compliance, technical capability, relevant experience, team qualifications, methodology and work plan, and presentation and completeness. Where the issuer publishes its own categories and weights, those are used instead.
- Eligibility, compliance and completeness checks, each marked met, not met or unclear, with a reference.
- Missing documents, weaknesses, internal inconsistencies (dates, names, figures that do not agree across sections) and issues that could lead to disqualification.
- Specific recommendations, ranked by priority.
- A downloadable copy of the report, formatted for printing or saving as PDF.
Transparent, and labelled for what it is
Where an issuer has not published evaluation criteria, the assessment uses standard Nigerian public procurement practice under the Public Procurement Act 2007 and development finance consultant selection practice, and the report is marked provisional. Every report states plainly that the score is advisory: it is not an official procurement score, an evaluation by the issuing body or a prediction of success. It is a disciplined second reading, done quickly, by a reader that checks every requirement.
Confidentiality
Tender submissions contain pricing, client references and team details that firms do not share. The service is designed accordingly:
- Files are encrypted at rest and stored outside the public web directory.
- Each submission and its report are visible only to the account that uploaded it and to Meridian administrators. No firm can see another firm’s documents, scores or history.
- The firm chooses how long the file and report are kept (7, 30 or 90 days) and can delete both immediately at any time. Expired files are deleted automatically every night.
- Documents are processed by our AI provider solely to produce the assessment and are not used to train models.
Where it fits
Submission Intelligence sits alongside Meridian Mandate Watch, which tracks tenders, panel appointments, retainers and advisory mandates open to Nigerian law firms, with statuses that move automatically to Closing Soon seven days before a deadline, Urgent at 72 hours and Closed when the deadline passes unless the issuer has published an extension. Together they cover the two questions that matter in competitive work: what is open, and whether the response is ready.
Firms on the Firm membership can upload up to five submissions a day. Assess a submission, browse open mandates or see membership options.
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