ConsensusDOCS Guidebook

ConsensusDOCS is the product of 35 leading construction associations, dedicated to identifying and utilizing best practices in the construction industry for standard construction contracts.  The participating associations represent Designers, Owners, Contractors, Subcontractors, Specialty Contractors 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.  Rather, the documents offer a better contractual path forward from the status quo of today’s design and construction industry, which is too often contentious, inefficient and litigious. ConsensusDOCS contracts and forms are designed to fairly and appropriately allocate risks to the Party in the best position to manage and control the risk.  The drafters’ goals are to identify and utilize best practices that place parties in a position to achieve better project results.

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.  The ConsensusDOCS catalog includes complete “families” of documents for each project delivery method that provide a coordinated set of agreements and administrative forms.  There also are short form agreements that address the Owner-Contractor (205), the Owner-Design Professional (245), and the Contractor-Subcontractor (751) 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.  Individual association comments are expressions by an association to its association membership. These comments highlight provisions as well as alert their membership to make certain fill-in-the blank selections or 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; 205; 220; 221; 235; 240; 300; 301; 310; 410; 415; 500; 510; 710; 750; 751; 752 and 803; and the bond forms collectively.