Legal and Contractual Challenges of Building Information Modeling—Designers’ Perspectives: Fid-Bau Portal

Legal and Contractual Challenges of Building Information Modeling—Designers’ Perspectives

Pandey, Arjun / Shahbodaghlou, Farzad / Burger, John

Generally, western legal systems are “individualistic” and focus on where the individual rights and responsibilities of people or parties begin and end. These types of legal systems have historically been able to handle traditional construction contracts effectively. In addition, the identifiable and quantifiable risks in such systems have enabled insurance industries to develop and offer a range of products for construction contracts. In contrast, building information modeling (BIM) is “collaborative” in nature and is most effectively used when participants jointly create such models. Hence, contracts involving BIM are more challenging to put together. This challenge manifests itself in two main groups within the construction industry, which have different perspectives; architects/designers on one side, and the general contractors and subcontractors on the other. This paper investigates the current legal and contractual challenges of BIM which designers face today. The survey results reveal that the design-bid-build contract delivery method is still used in majority of these projects and BIM is not included in the contract documents on the majority of the projects. BIM has been included in such contracts, but only as a “co-contract,” “inferential,” or “accommodation” document and majority of the participants have confusion about the component parts, which constitute the record on the contract. This is perhaps because, under existing contract laws, including BIM would upset the traditional allocation of risk among the industry participants.