2/1/2012; 4:37 p.m.

I’m heading down to Houston for a meeting of the ABA Forum on the Construction Industry.  You can learn about the Forum on the ABA website. It has subdivisions that focus on various interests such as insurance, owners and lenders, etc. I’ll try to "live blog" from the meeting, describing papers of interest that are presented.  

 

2/2/2012; 7:19 p.m.

I’m in Houston at the ABA forum Midwinter Meeting. The theme is strategies for complex projects. The first presentation today is called "Design Control and Delegation." It contrasts traditional design/construction relationships with the allocation of design responsibilities under building information modeling, or “BIM”. This paper and other papers being given today will be available from the ABA Forum website.

 

A program was announced today for young construction lawyers seeking trial experience. The program will accept 36 students for a week in Washington DC in June 2012, using experienced trial instructors in a realistic courtroom setting. The trial issues will be based on a construction project. Actual construction experts will serve as witnesses. There is now, or will shortly be, information about this on the Forum website.

 

2/2/2012; 10:11 a.m.

The third session is about open book accounting as it can contribute to the success of a collaborative project delivery method.

 

2/2/2012; 11:56 a.m.

Now listening to an interesting comparison between different methods of schedule delay analysis. The presenters note that different methods can yield significantly different results in particular cases and then make recommendations about how a reliable analysis should be done.

 

2/2/2012; 1:34 p.m.

Now we are hearing about how QA and QC procedures can differ for various project delivery systems (design-bid-build vs design-build). And how performance guarantees fit into the picture (we are in Houston so much of the attention is on energy projects).

 

2/2/2012; 2:14 p.m.

We are concluding with a series of scenarios about potential ethical issues arising from lawyers representing joint ventures and JV partners. It has been an informative day.

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Photo of Karl Oles Karl Oles

Karl Oles, a partner of the firm practicing in the Construction and Design group, has for more than 30 years helped owners, architects, engineers, and contractors solve complex legal problems through negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and trial. Karl has also drafted, negotiated, and…

Karl Oles, a partner of the firm practicing in the Construction and Design group, has for more than 30 years helped owners, architects, engineers, and contractors solve complex legal problems through negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and trial. Karl has also drafted, negotiated, and analyzed multimillion-dollar design and construction contracts on a wide variety of construction projects. He has served as an arbitrator on the American Arbitration Association’s construction panel. He is coauthor of the current standard treatise on Washington lien law (available for free by following this link). He has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America© for Litigation-Construction from 2013 to 2018.

Click here for Karl Oles’ full bio.