ConsensusDOCS Guidebook
ConsensusDOCS is the product of leading construction associations, dedicated to identifying and utilizing best practices in the construction industry for standard construction contracts. The 21 participating associations represent Designers, Owners, Contractors, Subcontractors, and Sureties that literally spell the DOCS in ConsensusDOCS. If you are looking for documents that are pro-Owner or pro-Contractor, you should not use these documents. ConsensusDOCS contracts and forms attempt to fairly and appropriately allocate risks to the Party in the position to manage and control the risk. The practices articulated in the documents are forward-thinking, and may notalways represent the status quo, but rather a better path forward. The goal of the multidisciplined drafters was to create documents that best place the Parties to a construction contract in aposition to complete a project on time and on budget with the highest possibility of avoiding claims.
By starting with better standard documents that possess unprecedented buy-in, you reduce your transaction time and costs in reaching a final Agreement. Many “fill-in-the-blanks” are intended to lead to productive discussions about how particular risks should be allocated on specific projects before a contract is finalized. Also, the ConsensusDOCS catalog includes complete “families” of documents for each project delivery method that provide a coordinated set of Agreements and complimentary administrative forms. There also are short form Agreements that address the Owner-Contractor (205), the Owner-Design Professional (245), and the Contractor-Subcontractor contractual relationships in a more abbreviated manner than do the standard Agreements (ConsensusDOCS 200, 240, and 750 respectively).
In these Guidebooks you will find comments by individual associations regarding particular contract documents. These comments are organized by numeric sequence of the ConsensusDOCS contract documents. The overview sections highlight issues and innovative features of the documents generally. Association comments are expressions by an association to its association membership. These comments highlight provisions or alert their membership to consider possible project-specific modifications to a consensus standard Agreement or form. ConsensusDOCS contracts covered in this release of this Guidebook (others will be added later) include the 200; 200.1; 200.2; 240; 300; 301; 410; 500; 750 and 752.
