ANY INSIGHT OR COMMENTS ON THE FOLLOWING AND HOW THE NOW THIRD SET OF DOCUMENTS WILL IMPACT OUR WORK–
Kormantary: Engineers Champion Their Own Contract Documents
Posted by kormanr at 10/12/2007 4:20 PM
Remember the recent ENR story with the magazine cover showing the peapod and peas?
It’s weeks later and I’m still mystified by some of the dealings among the industry associations over the subject of that story, contract standard forms of agreement.
Associations representing 700,000 designers (ASCE, ACEC, AIA and NSPE) wrote a letter that ripped the misrepresentations they say are in my ENR cover story on the new ConsensusDocs program whose key players include AGC, ASA and several owner associations.
Although I spent some time in the story trying to pin down whether engineers are in or out of ConsensusDocs, I didn’t finish the job. Let me declare now that engineers are unequivocally out except for observing the process through individuals not authorized to make any decisions or official review on behalf of the associations.
Engineers will continue to publish the EJCDC standard forms of agreement and have no intention of joining ConsensusDocs.
There’s more going on here than I’m being told, but here’s some speculation.
Engineers seem annoyed that AGC staff suggested to me, and that I wrongly conveyed the impression, that engineers could join, participate or have anything official to do with ConsensusDocs other than observe. No way, engineers say.
I believe the rivalry among the associations is partly economic. AIA’s dominant franchise in standard forms of agreement is at least a million dollars in annual revenue and maybe more. EJCDC documents may be worth several hundred thousand to some member associations. That’s big money for the smallish associations that represent our industry designers. AGC and its allies in ConsensusDocs want to build their model contract revenue as well as put forward their documents as the “consensus” of what’s fair and best for owners and projects.
Note that the AIA updated documents are due out next month and ConsensusDocs upstaged them partly through the timing of the ConsensusDocs roll-out. Note how sophisticated AIA’s document program is and that AIA retained a separate public relations consultant just for the 2007 document update roll-out. Don’t ignore the fact that AIA’s top staff member, who had no direct complaint about AIA’s treatment in the ENR story, co-signed the letter to the editor with the engineers. Watch for the engineers to ramp up the marketing of their documents as the overall contest heats up.
You can thank ConsensusDocs (and the way events were conveyed in the ENR story) for sparking engineer-architect consensus on this matter at least.