The Question That Determines Everything

The email from the plaintiff’s attorney arrived on a Tuesday morning. Your firm was being sued for $3.2 million in cost overruns on a project you completed two years ago. The client claimed you failed to coordinate disciplines, missed critical design conflicts, and provided inadequate construction oversight.

Your first call was to your professional liability carrier. Their first question wasn’t about the technical merits of the claim. It was: “What documentation do you have?” The answer to that question would determine everything.

Here’s what most engineering firms misunderstand about quality assurance and quality control: QA/QC isn’t about catching typos on drawings. It’s not a checklist you complete before submitting it to the building department. And it’s certainly not something you can bolt onto a project when the schedule gets tight.

QA/QC is the operational evidence that you met the professional standard of care.
When a claim arrives (statistics suggest one in four firms will receive one this year) your technical competence won’t be judged by how brilliant your solution was. It will be judged by whether you can prove you followed a reasonable process to arrive at that solution. The elegance of your structural system means nothing if you can’t demonstrate that you considered alternatives, documented your assumptions, and communicated limitations to your client.
The firms that survive claims aren’t necessarily the ones that make fewer mistakes. They’re the ones that can prove they acted reasonably when mistakes happened.

A defensible risk management program rests on four cornerstones: identifying risks, allocating them by contract, implementing QA/QC procedures, and providing disciplined construction administration.

Most firms do the first two reasonably well. They spot the geotechnical hazards, the aggressive schedule, the novel materials. They negotiate contracts (or at least try to). Then they assume the hard work is done.

What they miss: the contract promises a standard of care, but QA/QC is how you prove you delivered it.

Think about it this way. Your contract says you’ll provide services consistent with professional standards. That’s good language—it’s a negligence standard, not a warranty. But three years later, when you’re sitting in a deposition being asked why you didn’t catch a coordination conflict between mechanical and structural, your answer can’t be “we’re pretty good at what we do.”
You need contemporaneous documentation showing:

QA/QC provides that documentation. Construction administration creates the record of how your design performed when it met reality. Together, they connect what you promised in the contract to what actually happened in the field.

Without them, you’re asking a jury to trust you about events from years ago. With them, you’re showing them exactly what you knew, when you knew it, and what you did about it.

The bases of design narrative may be the most undervalued document in engineering.
Here’s why it matters: Three years from now, when someone questions why you selected a particular foundation system, you won’t remember the site visit where the geotechnical engineer mentioned the bedrock conditions. You won’t remember the client meeting where they rejected the more expensive alternative. You won’t remember the building official’s interpretation that drove your design approach.

But if you documented it contemporaneously, you don’t need to remember.

The bases of design should capture:

This isn’t academic paperwork. When a dispute arises, the basis of design demonstrates that your decisions were reasoned, informed, and consistent with professional standards at the time they were made.

Notice that qualifier: at the time they were made.

You’re not judged by information that emerged later. You’re not held to standards that didn’t exist when you performed the work. But you need contemporary documentation to establish what you knew and when you knew it.

The firms that skip this step usually explain that they’re too busy, the schedule is too tight, or the client won’t pay for it. Then they spend $50,000 in legal fees reconstructing their decision-making process from memory and fragmentary email threads.

Let’s talk about a common scenario: Your design is technically correct. It satisfies code requirements. It meets the performance criteria. But it requires construction methods that add 30% to the project cost, and now you’re facing a claim for economic damages.

This is where constructability review saves you.

The purpose isn’t just making sure the building can be physically assembled. It’s ensuring that:

Notice what this accomplishes from a risk standpoint: When you bring experienced construction personnel into the design process early and document their input, you create evidence that you considered how the design would be built.

If disputes arise about cost or schedule impacts, you’re not defending a design created in isolation from construction realities. You’re showing that you actively sought input from people who understand means and methods.

This last point—written documentation—is critical. An informal hallway conversation with a contractor might improve your design, but it provides zero protection in litigation. A documented constructability session with meeting minutes creates a contemporaneous record of your process.

Change orders are inevitable on complex projects. But their causes are usually preventable, and many of those causes trace directly to QA/QC failures.

The most common drivers include:

Professional liability claims consistently cite these coordination and documentation gaps as leading contributors to disputes.

Here’s the pattern: During design, everyone is busy. Schedules are compressed. The team assumes coordination issues will get resolved somehow. Then bidding happens, contractors price the ambiguities conservatively, and the owner receives bids significantly over budget.

Now there’s a problem. And the owner’s attorney starts reviewing your contract to determine whether you met your standard of care. The defense against this scenario isn’t heroic last-minute coordination efforts. It’s systematic QA/QC throughout the design process:

These aren’t optional refinements for projects with generous budgets. They’re essential practices for every project, because the alternative is becoming a defendant.

Here’s a statistic that should fundamentally change how you approach every project: Industry surveys consistently show that unmet client expectations—not technical errors—drive the majority of claims against design professionals.

Read that again. The problem usually isn’t that you made a calculation mistake. It’s that the client expected something you never promised to deliver.

This happens because engineers focus on technical scope while ignoring expectation management. The contract says you’re providing “structural design services.” You interpret that to mean calculations and drawings sufficient to obtain a building permit. The client interprets it to mean a building that costs exactly what they budgeted and has zero change orders during construction. When reality doesn’t match their expectations, they don’t blame their expectations. They blame you.

The solution requires deliberate communication and thorough documentation:

At project initiation:

Throughout the project:

For any innovative or high-risk elements:

This last point deserves emphasis because it’s where the doctrine of informed consent becomes your protection.

Let’s say your client wants to achieve LEED Platinum certification using a novel “green” building product you’ve never specified before. You research it, review the technical literature, and believe it will work if it performs as the manufacturer represents.

If you simply specify it without documentation, you’ve created a warranty claim waiting to happen. When the product underperforms two years later, the client could sue you for the costs of replacement and lost certification benefits.

But here’s the alternative approach:

You provide a written advisory stating:

When the client acknowledges this in writing, you’ve accomplished something critical: you’ve realigned responsibility toward the manufacturer and installer if the product fails, while keeping yourself within the professional standard of care rather than as a product guarantor.

This is the difference between being sued for breach of warranty (which your professioal liability policy excludes) versus being sued for negligence in product selection (which your policy covers—and which you can defend by showing your reasonable process).

Many firms view construction phase services as added liability exposure. They minimize site visits, process submittals quickly without thorough review, and treat RFI responses as distractions from more important work. This is exactly backwards.

Construction administration, when properly scoped and documented, reduces risk rather than increasing it. Claims retrospectives consistently show that disputes arise when:

The solution isn’t avoiding construction services. It’s ensuring your contract clearly defines your role and then documenting everything.

Your contract should state:

This language protects you from responsibility you can’t control. Then your documentation proves you fulfilled the responsibilities you did assume.

Critical documentation includes:

Here’s what many engineers miss: email is discoverable evidence with the same legal weight as formal letters. The casual comment you typed in thirty seconds while standing in line for coffee becomes Exhibit C in the plaintiff’s case.

Every email should stick to facts and professional judgments. Avoid:

The standard should be: if this email were projected on a screen in front of a jury, would it help or hurt my case?

Anyone can sue you. That’s the uncomfortable reality of professional practice. A client who’s disappointed, a contractor who lost money, an owner facing cost overruns—any of them can file a complaint alleging you were negligent.

But here’s what thorough QA/QC and disciplined documentation accomplish: they make it significantly harder for a claimant to prevail.

When you can produce:

You’re not asking the trier of fact to trust your memory or accept your characterization of events. You’re showing them exactly what happened, when it happened, and how you responded.
This is why documentation is often called your most effective defense. Not because it prevents claims—nothing prevents claims—but because it transforms the litigation dynamic.

Instead of “he said, she said” arguments about what was discussed in meetings years ago, you’re presenting contemporaneous records created before anyone knew there would be a dispute. Those records don’t have a motive to lie. They weren’t created to support litigation. They’re simply the professional record of what occurred.

In a climate of compressed schedules, rising workloads, and increasing claim frequency, treating QA/QC and documentation as optional refinements is professional malpractice waiting to happen. The firms that thrive—the ones that take on challenging projects, maintain client relationships through difficult situations, and emerge from disputes with their reputations intact—are the ones that elevated QA/QC from afterthought to core business process.

This isn’t about bureaucracy or paperwork for its own sake. It’s about recognizing a fundamental truth: when contracts reflect realistic standards of care, when decisions and warnings are memorialized, and when construction services are clearly defined and consistently documented, you’re positioned to prove you acted reasonably. Even on projects where conditions change. Even when budgets tighten. Even when design assumptions must evolve. Because the professional standard of care doesn’t require perfection. It requires that you act as a reasonable professional would under the same circumstances.

QA/QC and documentation are how you prove you met that standard. The question isn’t whether you can afford the time and effort to implement rigorous QA/QC procedures.
The question is whether you can afford not to. ■

The information contained herein is not intended to constitute legal or other professional advice and should not be relied upon in lieu of consultation with your own legal advisors. In the event you would like more information regarding your insurance coverage, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. In North America, WTW offers insurance products through licensed entities, including Willis Towers Watson Northeast, Inc. (in the United States) and Willis Canada Inc. (in Canada).

About the Author

Mark Blankenship is Director of Risk Management for WTW A&E. WTW A&E is the Center of Excellence for WTW that is exclusively dedicated to providing insurance and risk management solutions to architects and engineers in North America. More information on WTW A&E can be found at www.wtwae.com.