How crews catch scope changes hidden in revised drawings before they eat the margin

The case, Young Contracting/SE, Inc. v. Pitt Excavating, LLC, was decided recently by the Tennessee Court of Appeals and summarized by construction lawyer Matthew DeVries of Buchalter. Pitt's subcontract tied its work to the drawings "as amended from time to time." Its owner testified that he checked only the clouded parts of a revised sheet and took the rest as unchanged. The trial court held that Pitt never worked the changes into its scope in time and breached first, and the appeals court agreed. The owner also admitted that many emails went unopened, and the subcontract treated email as valid notice.

A cloud is the designer's markup and can miss an edit. DeVries's advice is to compare each revision with the version before it and flag in writing, right away, anything that moves your scope, price, manpower, sequence or schedule. That includes changes you believe were left unmarked.

PDF overlay tools do the comparing. In Bluebeam Revu, Overlay Pages stacks the old and new sheet in two colors so matching linework blends and edits stand out, Novedge explains in a Revu guide. It says to confirm both sheets share page size, orientation and origin, to align on reference points when title blocks shift, and to run architectural, structural and MEP sets separately. Put both revision numbers in the overlay file name and log every confirmed change, so the record exists when the change order gets priced.

Then watch the calendar. Under AIA's A201-2017 general conditions, a claim has to be started within 21 days of the event or of when the contractor first recognizes the condition, whichever comes later, Ellis & Winters lawyers wrote. A short written notice reserving time and money is usually enough to start one. They add that owners sometimes push the window down to 48 hours or less.