Under prevailing standard general contracts, both the general contractor and the design professionals share a responsibility for review and “approval” of sub-mittals. It has been arranged in this way in an effort to increase the likelihood that shop drawing errors will be detected and corrected.
Contractors’ review/approval responsibilities principally are to:
1. Check for conformance to the contract documents.
2. Highlight deviations from those documents, either because of necessity (conflict, impossibility, etc.) or other reason.
3. Coordinate the work with contiguous work.
Unless there is extremely unusual language in the general contract, it is not the contractors’ responsibility to find mistakes or otherwise correct the contract documents themselves.
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