The Construction Specifications Institute and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) have announced CSI’s endorsement of three AIA Contract Documents for use by owners and consultants. This endorsement follows a thorough review of the documents by the CSI Technical Committee, which analyzed the documents for good industry practice, consistency, and alignment with CSI core technical values.

“This endorsement speaks to the relevance and usefulness of our owner-consultant documents” said Deborah DeBernard, AIA, NCARB, Architect AIBC, LEED BD&C, Senior Vice President of Global Innovation at the AIA. “Consultants—particularly land surveyors and geotechnical engineers—play important roles in the pre-design phase of most building projects. Our owner-consultant agreement and scope of service exhibits for land surveying and geotechnical engineering represent a modernization of the outdated request for proposal model of hiring consultants.”

The endorsement by CSI includes the following AIA Contract Documents:

• AIA Document C103 – 2015, Standard Form of Agreement Between Owner and Consultant without a Predefined Scope of Consultant’s Services
• AIA Document C201 – 2015, Standard Form of Consultant’s Services: Land Survey
• AIA Document C202 – 2015, Standard Form of Consultant’s Services: Geotechnical Engineering

“CSI is pleased to endorse these agreement and scope forms that provide a stable and consistent framework that benefit owners, consultants, and the architects and engineers that rely on the owner to provide these services,” said Lane Beougher, CSI’s 2015-2016 president. “Collaboration works best when project risks are allocated to the party most suited to manage that risk, and AIA’s owner-consultant agreements elegantly accomplish that objective.”

CSI has previously endorsed the AIA’s Digital Practice and Design-Build families of documents.

All of the documents the CSI has endorsed are available for purchase in the latest version of the AIA Contract Documents software, and through AIA Documents-on-Demand, and AIA Documents-on-Demand Plus.