Imagine being a parent of a beautiful 6-year-old who just graduated kindergarten and to celebrate, you take her to a newly constructed local hotel resort. At the hotel, she sees an outdoor water fountain, grabs a metal railing encircling it and 120 volts of electricity shoot through her tiny body. In an instant, her life and those […]

Remember the superintendent who decided to go to law school after our speakerphone showdown? Here’s another real-world case that provides another lesson on risk avoidance: The 2023 Oregon case, Kizer Excavating v. Stout Building Contractors is a take on the idiom “no good deed goes unpunished.” In the case, an excavator performed 3,290 cubic yards […]

In the first year of law school, you learn to “issue spot.” Students are handed a set of facts and told to figure out how to apply the facts to a given set of laws. Years later, on a construction site, I got the real-world version. A young site superintendent put me on speakerphone in […]

On Tuesday, we saw what happens when documentation fails: the Taino case fell apart in court due to poor recordkeeping and documentation. Today, let’s talk about how to prevent that. Project teams rarely regret thorough documentation, but they often regret what’s missing. When disputes arise, facts matter more than recollections. The story told by your records becomes […]

This week, the Court of Federal Claims dismissed a contractor’s $234K breach claim — not because the work wasn’t done, but because it wasn’t properly documented. Law360 reports that the Air Force terminated for cause the Pennsylvania contractor’s contract to demolish nine buildings at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia. The contractor sued for the remaining […]