Construction Contracts

David Adelstein is a Florida bar board certified construction attorney that has experience preparing and negotiating construction contracts for developers and owners, general contractors, subcontractors, and design professionals for a variety of construction projects–public and private.

Preparing and negotiating construction contracts is important.  There are a lot of risks that need to be considered and assessed based on the magnitude of the project and the type of delivery system the project entails.  For example, a design-bid-build job, design-build job, engineer-procure-construct job, construction manager at-risk job, construction manager-agency job, integrated project delivery job, and public private partnership job are all project delivery methods that involve different risks.  And, even if the project delivery method is the same, the complexity, scope, price, owner requirements, scheduling requirements, status of the contract documents, etc., relating to a specific project will breed project-specific risks.  Additionally, the status of the owner (e.g., public state or local government owner, federal government owner, or private owner) will also be factored into the assessment of risk. All of these factors need to be considered when preparing and negotiating construction contracts, whether a prime contract or a subcontract.

David Adelstein has experience utilizing industry form contracts such as AIA contracts, ConsensusDocs contracts, and EJCDC contracts, in addition to non-industry form contracts.  He has experience both drafting and negotiating contracts based on the dynamics of the project and the risk assessment input from his clients.  He also lectures on project delivery methods and key considerations when it comes to preparing and negotiating construction contracts.

When it comes to prime contracts, please check out this chart relating to risk assessment considerations and this chart that shows a comparison of certain risk allocation provisions in the general conditions of three industry form contracts (published by the AIA, EJCDC, and ConsensusDocs.)

When it comes to subcontracts, please check out this chart relating to certain risk assessment considerations.  From a subcontractor’s perspective, this article discusses questions you should ask or issues you want to consider when drafting or negotiating a subcontract.  These are also issues important to a contractor.

Finally, when it comes to all contracts, the scope of work is crucial and time must be spent carefully drafting the scope.

Please contact David Adelstein at dadelstein@gmail.com or (954) 361-4720 if you have questions or would like more information regarding construction contracts. You can follow David Adelstein on Twitter @DavidAdelstein1.