The commonest reason an owner calls us is not doubt about the contractor. It is a date. The amendment is drafted, counsel is reviewing the terms, the lender wants the executed document, and it becomes clear that the commercial content of the price has been read by the people who wrote it and by nobody else.
A full reading is three to four weeks. If you do not have three to four weeks, the choice is not between a full review and a rapid one. It is between a rapid one and none.
What makes the short version worth doing is that exposure is not spread evenly. On a typical guaranteed maximum price between ten and a hundred and fifty million dollars, three to five lines carry most of what can go wrong: an allowance set below what the scope behind it will cost, a qualification that quietly moves a scope back to you, a contingency with no rules about who spends it, and a completion date with no float behind it. Those are readable in days.
Five to ten working days. Fees are quoted per project once we have seen the documents, never as a percentage of what the review finds.
Every allowance read against the scope it is supposed to buy, not against last year’s rate. An allowance is a promise to spend, not a promise about what the thing costs, and the gap between those two is where the first change order comes from.
The list the contractor attached to the price, read as what it is: a definition of scope written by the party giving the guarantee. Each one marked with what it moves back to you and what that is worth.
How much, whose it is, what it may be spent on, whether you see the drawdowns, and what happens to the balance. Four of those five are usually unwritten.
Every finding on one page, ranked by dollars, each citing the document and page it came from. Short enough to take into a meeting and specific enough to argue from.
Forty five minutes to walk the register through, with your counsel or your owner’s representative on the line if you want them there.
What a package is worth depends as much on what it refuses to do as on what it covers, so the limits are on the page rather than in the engagement letter alone.
The schedule logic, the interfaces between trade packages and the change order machinery. All three matter, and all three need more time than this package has.
Findings that depend on the drawings or on the baseline schedule come back at lower confidence, and we mark which ones and why rather than presenting them at full strength.
If you have three weeks, buy the full review. This package exists because that is often not the situation, not because it is the better product.
We work back from your date rather than quoting a duration and letting you discover the collision later.
You send the draft amendment, the schedule of values and the qualifications list. Anything else you hold is useful. A document that does not exist yet is itself a finding.
We read the commercial set against itself and against whatever drawings came with it. No questions to the contractor unless you ask for them.
The register comes back ranked by exposure, followed by the call. You sign, or you go back into the room with something specific.
If the answer to any of these decides whether the package is right for you, ask us before you commission it rather than after.
For the largest exposures, yes. For the schedule and the package interfaces, no, and we say so on the front page of the register rather than letting the omission pass unnoticed. What you get is the most valuable third of a full review, delivered in time to use.
Tell us the date before you commission anything. Sometimes four days is enough to read the allowances and the qualifications and nothing else, which is still worth having. Sometimes it is not, and we would rather say that than take the fee.
Yes, and the rapid work is not repeated. What we already read carries across, so the full review picks up at the schedule, the interfaces and the change exposure rather than starting again from the beginning. You pay the difference between the two fees, not both of them, and the register you already hold becomes the first section of the larger one.
Not from us. We are not a party to your contract and we do not approach the other side for documents, explanations or anything else. Everything we read comes from you. What you then do with the register is entirely your decision, and most owners use it to choose which three items to raise rather than sending it across.
The four packages draw on the same modules and the same method. What changes is scope, speed and who the memo is written for.
Short pieces on the mechanisms this package is built to catch, written from the owner side of the contract.
Every package runs the same method and the same registers. What changes is how much of it runs, how fast, and who the document has to survive being read by. The packages overview sets the four against each other, and the four modules describe the work itself.