The Other Contract Document Forms

Most of BSD’s customers are architects who are very familiar with AIA contract documents and AIA’s electronic document software. Our professional engineer customers are undoubtedly familiar with the standard contract forms published by the Engineers Joint Contract Documents Committee (EJCDC). However, we suspect that many of our customers are not aware of the fact that AGC (The Associated General Contractors of America) also publishes a wide selection of standard contract forms for construction. Not only are these forms very similar in scope to those produced by AIA and EJCDC, they are also available in a software product that was developed by BSD for AGC—a product named AGC DocuBuilder^®.

The forms developed by AGC are well balanced and fair, and they are created with input from a wide range of sources. For example, The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) has endorsed the AGC 200 general conditions document and its AGC 400 design-build agreement. The Associated Specialty Contractors (ASC) organization has endorsed the AGC 650 subcontract agreement. EJCDC has approved the AGC 510 and 520 construction management documents. Even AIA has jointly drafted with AGC its 565 and 566 construction management-at-risk documents. AGC has approximately 100 standard contract forms, all of which are available in AGC DocuBuilder, including an Owner-A/E agreement comparable in scope to AIA’s B141 document and EJCDC’s E-500 document.

In addition to the balanced fairness of the AGC documents, the fact that they are available in intuitive software that looks and feels much like BSD SpecLink® should make the product of special interest to our customers. Anyone who has worked with the AIA software should be especially appreciative of DocuBuilder’s ease of use. In addition, DocuBuilder has unique features such as context-sensitive notes that provide background information and explanations of particular contract provisions.

The software allows global replacement of key terms, such as "Contractor" and "Owner," and it allows users to insert project-specific headers with automated keyword replacement for all documents in a project. Users may choose to print comparative documents that show the changes from the standard forms by underlining and strikethroughs, or they can print "clean" documents that show no changes. In the latter case, an automatic footer is changed to alert readers to the fact that unmarked changes may have been made to the standard contract language.

AGC DocuBuilder also offers more flexibility in pricing than the AIA product. In addition to annual subscriptions for unlimited use and a meter mode option that allows infrequent users to pay by the document, DocuBuilder also offers access to subsets of the documents. There are four groups of documents that can be subscribed to separately, plus a fifth group of short form documents. For instance, an architect might need access only to the 200 series documents that cover general construction. A subcontractor, on the other hand, might need only the subcontract documents in the 600 series. Each document series is available for a fraction of the cost of a full subscription, and each is priced well below the subscription price of the AIA product. It’s even possible to buy a subscription to one series of frequently used documents and to combine the subscription with a meter mode account that allows access to infrequently used documents outside of the subscription.

For more complete descriptions of the documents available in each series and the product pricing, interested parties should visit AGC’s website, at www.agc.org, where DocuBuilder can also be purchased via the AGC e-store. For the month of March 2007, new customers who buy a DocuBuilder subscription for the full range of documents will receive a free iPod nano.