BIM Open Forum

The Centre of Construction Law in The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, hosted the Building Information Modelling (BIM) Open Forum on 13 February 2014.

"Design and Construction Liability in the Digital Age- BIM and Related Revolutions" debated the following procurement initiatives, the links between them and their impact on the legal liability of construction clients, designers and contractors:

• The new Two Stage Open Book Project Procurement and Delivery Guidance, authored by King’s and published by HM Government in January 2014
• The outturns for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) from their Cookham Wood Trial Project completed in January 2014 ,adopting  Two Stage Open Book in conjunction with Building Information Modelling(BIM) Level 2
• The more flexible and collaborative design stages set out in the RIBA 2013 Plan of Work, aligned both with BIM and with Two Stage Open book.

The speakers reviewed how these strands of procurement reform are tied together legally, and explained to delegates their impact on the exposure of project team members, including the different contracting approaches adopted to date. They reviewed how the MoJ Trial Project provided for the adoption of BIM to be supported by the processes comprising Two Stage Open Book, including early conditional appointment of a main contractor and preconstruction phase engagement with key subcontractors .They analysed how this approach secured contributions to the transparent build-up of improved designs with controls over cost, time and risk in order to achieve a robust price and programme in advance of start on site.

The Open Forum attracted 158 delegates and was chaired by Nicholas Gould, Visiting Senior Lecturer at the King’s College Centre of Construction Law and a partner in Fenwick Elliott solicitors. The speakers were:

• Phillip Capper, King’s Nash Professor of Engineering and a partner in White and Case solicitors
• Dale Sinclair, Vice-President of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a director of Dyer Architects
• Professor David Mosey, Director of the King’s Centre of Construction Law
• Assad Maqbool , a partner in Trowers and Hamlins solicitors.

The Open Forum considered what the adoption of BIM will mean in legal and contractual terms, including its impact on team members’ statutory and common law duties, their intellectual property rights, their management of change, their liability for electronic data and their duty to warn of other parties’ errors or omissions. Delegates discussed the extent to which the impact of these issues is mitigated by the use of early conditional appointments spelling out the preconstruction phase processes and binding the team to clear deadlines. They commented on how MoJ used this approach to integrate the design contributions of team members in line with development of a “federated” BIM model.

In contracting for BIM, Professor Mosey explained that the Cookham Wood Trial Project revealed something surprising, namely the absence of any special BIM amendments to the PPC2000 standard form building contract and the absence of a separate contractual BIM protocol.  Instead, the Open Forum heard how MoJ spelt out the BIM contributions of each party in their respective service schedules, in joint contractual timetables and in multi-party intellectual property licences without the need to introduce new exclusions or limitations of liability.

Contributions from the floor provided valuable input to the debate and to ongoing research by the King’s Centre of Construction Law in this specialist legal and cross-disciplinary field.

Visit the Centre of Construction Law website.