Liability in BIM projects—Preliminary review results

Abstract

Building Information Modelling (BIM) fosters a collaborative working environment. With the industry moving toward this change, most practitioners believe that, compared to traditional methods, there will be a change in project liabilities and risk assignment. Design integration through BIM leads to ambiguity in determining the party responsible for the design. Therefore, BIM parties need to understand not only BIM but also the change in their responsibilities and think of solutions to liability and risk assignment. Based on the information gathered from three resources, this study aims at reviewing solutions to design liability assignment. These three resources are as follows: the existing research studies in the field of BIM adoption challenges, the existing contractual standards such as AIA G202, and contract conditions of 10 BIM projects. Findings indicate that there has been a lack of attention to design liability in BIM. The results provide significant insights into the status of BIM liability issue, the existing gaps in the knowledge, and potential future research.

Keywords

Building Information Modelling legal and contractual issues challenges design liability literature review

Introduction

Many basic roles, responsibilities, communication practices, and design processes change under BIM.¹ BIM enables information interoperability in respect of a building or facility throughout its life cycle.² It enhances collaboration among different stakeholders and changes the routines for how projects are initiated and conducted.³ For effective adoption of BIM, a change in traditional work practices is required, where it needs a greater collaboration and communication among project participants and efficient flow of information.⁴ This improved multiparty communication and understanding is recognized as the highest return from BIM investment.⁵ In fact, BIM success depends on close collaboration among the client, designers, contractors, and consultants.⁶ Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) system in BIM projects is changing the way that owners, architects/engineers, and contractors interact throughout project lifecycle. In an IPD system, contractors are involved in the pre-design stage and provide input to the model that affects architect’s design. Architects/engineers are developing a model that will be used by contractors to construct the project. While each party bears a single point of responsibility in traditional contracts, the overlap of roles and responsibilities in BIM affects the amount of risk placed upon contracting parties⁷ and presents higher liability exposure.⁸ BIM is not only changing the design processes but also the liability and responsibility of each team member.⁹ This change in communications is one of the main concerns raised due to the use of BIM, since it blurs the lines of responsibility,¹⁰ which leads to difficulties in determining the party liable for design errors, especially if multiple persons or firms have entered or changed data during the process.¹¹

Reliance on other parties’ work may be limited by professional registration statutes and ethics.¹ This increases the need for a solution to be developed to define responsibilities between parties, appropriately. In case of inappropriate liability allocation, for example, the receiving parties have to recreate their own model in order to ensure model accuracy. In this case, projects are not able to achieve the full benefits of BIM.¹²

It can be claimed that BIM potentially lacks established protocols for determining responsibility, especially when something goes wrong with a model, to which all participants have made contribution.¹³ Besides, precedent legal cases in BIM are not frequent that possibly can assist in providing effective solutions based on experience.¹⁴ This is while legal risks of BIM should be mitigated through predisposed strategies.¹⁵ However, it is important for the parties to conduct an effective investigation into the practical solutions to BIM challenges, so they will be adequately prepared to confront those challenges before turning into crisis. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate research efforts that have been devoted to the subject of Liability in BIM projects, to date, their approaches to dealing with Liability, and the strategies they provide to address Liability assignment. The current study examines this subject by exploring existing research studies in BIM challenges, contract provisions of real-world BIM projects, and existing standard forms of contract.

The following section provides an overview of Liability in BIM. After that, the search strategy and the method of identifying relevant literature are discussed in detail. Subsequently, findings from exploring identified literature, contractual standards, and contract provisions of BIM projects are presented. A summary of the study, its findings, and insights into future research conclude the article.

Liability

BIM brings some new risks of its own. These include risks of liability, copyright, and ownership due to weakening concept of responsibility.¹⁶ The increasing number of people involved in modifying and using a single model leads to BIM models to require clear understanding of not only who owns the model (model ownership) but also who is responsible for maintaining the model.¹⁷ Joint authorship of different BIM model developers complicates joint and separate liability for any errors made during the project lifecycle.¹⁸ Additionally, other project participants such as contractors are exposed to liability for file translation errors, loss of data, or data misuse.¹⁹

Hence, because multiple parties will be relying on the accuracy of data provided to the model by each other, owners will want all parties to represent and warrant the accuracy of their data. One error by one party can cause a ripple effect of errors throughout the entire model. The parties must acknowledge the potential for such magnified liability and responsibility for their data. They should also discuss whether these representations and warranties will be acceptable and/or backed by appropriate indemnities and insurance.²⁰ According to studies, the majority of the contracts do not have clearly visible provision for indemnification, insurance, or bonding. The main idea is that an architect maintains professional liability insurance for his activities. When the architect delegates his design obligations, he is at risk unless the contractors to whom he delegates have professional liability insurance in place when they perform changes. Otherwise, any defective design claims could seek restitution from the architect’s professional liability insurance policy.²¹

Liability for design is traditionally based on the Standard of Care for each discipline, a Tort law concept that contract law borrows to define the reciprocal responsibilities of each contracting party. The modification of the Standard of Care among parties is not always clear. The level of collaboration an architect can have in a BIM project and the extent to which he can rely on his collaborators’ contributions while meeting this standard is still a question.²¹ The lack of agreement on the legal clauses²² gives rise to the significance of the problem.

Research objective and method

The objective of this research is to realize the status of “Design Liability in BIM” by exploring available solutions to this issue in three groups of resources: 1) existing studies through bibliometric analysis that allows the quantitative and holistic probing of the literature, 2) manual screening of the existing contractual standards, and 3) contract provisions in real BIM projects. Therefore, the level of importance of this issue and the associated strategies will be recognized. The process of identifying relevant studies, that is, the first group, is discussed in detail in the following sections.

Inclusion criteria and search strategy

This section explains the method that was used in order to explore the first resource, that is, existing literature. Since liability is a contractual issue with BIM adoption, this study has investigated research studies on BIM adoption in construction projects and the associated contractual issues. This article selected the database Scopus, which is one of the largest abstracts and citation databases of peer-reviewed journals, books, and conference proceedings, to download the bibliographic records for analysis. Scopus also allows a combination of constraints to streamline the document search.²³

The bibliometric search in Scopus was based on the following terms shown in either Title, Abstract, or the Keywords: “Building Information Modeling,” “BIM,” “Adoption,” “Implementation,” “Legal,” “Contract,” “Issue,” “Barriers,” “Challenges,” “Conflict,” “Dispute,” “Claim,” “Risk,” “Liability,” “Responsibility,” and “Design Error.”

The date range was set to publications dated before 2020 in order to identify the research trend in the field over time. Moreover, the following rules were set for an advanced search: “Engineering” was selected as Subject Area, “Article OR Conference Paper” as Document Type, “Journal OR Conference Proceeding” as Source Type, and finally Language was limited to “English.” Based on these search rules, the authors defined the query strings to search Scopus. Since multiple keywords have been used and this could lead to inaccurate results, the authors implemented four query strings as follows; these strings are categorized based on relevant keywords.

1st String: ( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( bim ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( building AND information AND model* ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ( contract* ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( legal ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( risk ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , “ar” ) OR LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , “cp” ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , “English” ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SRCTYPE , “j” ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , “ENGI” ) ) AND (PUBYEAR < 2020).

2nd String: ( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( bim ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( building AND information AND model* ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Adopt* ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Implement* ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , “ar” ) OR LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , “cp” ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , “English” ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SRCTYPE , “j” ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , “ENGI” ) ) AND (PUBYEAR < 2020).

3rd String: ( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( bim ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( building AND information AND model* ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Barrier ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Issue ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Challeng* ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Conflict* ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Disput* ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Risk ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , “ar” ) OR LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , “cp” ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , “English” ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SRCTYPE , “j” ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , “ENGI” ) ) AND (PUBYEAR < 2020).

4th String: ( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( bim ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( building AND information AND model* ) AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Liabilit* ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Responsibilit* ) OR TITLE-ABS-KEY ( Design Error ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , “ar” ) OR LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , “cp” ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , “English” ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SRCTYPE , “j” ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , “ENGI" ) ) AND (PUBYEAR < 2020).

Each bibliographic record contained the metadata of the article, including title, authors and their affiliations, abstract, author keywords, title of journal, title of publisher, year of publication, volume and page numbers, number of citations, list of references, and DOI. All four retrieved data sets were merged into one database. The database search returned 390 records. After a manual screening of abstracts, 65 irrelevant records were omitted. The remaining 325 covered a period of 16 years; the date of the oldest retrieved article was 2005.

Bibliometric techniques and tools

To analyze the downloaded dataset, keyword co-occurrence analysis was applied to map keywords in terms of their co-occurrences in documents. This technique helped in revealing the development trends and depicting the knowledge body of the retrieved publications. In order to conduct this, the authors used VOSviewer; a software that is intended primarily for analyzing bibliometric networks of publications, journals, keywords, etc.²⁴ To import the database into VOSviewer, the first requirement was an organized list of the keywords. Hence, for example, the word “BIM” was used to indicate either “BIM” or “Building Information Modeling/Modelling.” Another example is “Visualization” that was used to indicate “Visualization” or “Visualisation.” The same applied to all keywords in the database.

Betweenness Centrality was another analysis that the authors conducted using Pajek. Pajek is a program package for analysis and visualization of large networks,²⁵ and the betweenness at a point measures to what extent the point can play the role of intermediary in the interaction between others.²⁶

The results of analyses mentioned above are presented in the following section (Liability in the Literature).

Liability in the literature

Development trends in relevant publications

The number of annual publications is depicted in Figure 1. As this figure shows, the first research in the field of BIM implementation has been published in 2005. After this date, a relatively steady increase in the number of publications, as presented by the dashed curve, occurs. This indicates the growing importance of BIM adoption pros. and cons.; as BIM implementation has become more common, more researchers have started considering the associated challenges and benefits.

Figure 1.

The number of annual publications.

Co-occurrence analysis

The authors used this technique to identify the main themes and trends in the field of BIM contractual challenges. To provide an understanding of the contents covered in studies, and to show the core of the studies and the focal point of their investigations, a network of keywords co-occurrences was created using VOSviewer.

As a result, a total of 1670 keywords were extracted from the dataset. In VOSviewer, the co-occurrence analysis was conducted based on keywords, with the minimum number of occurrences set to 4, and counting method set to fractional counting. Hence, 66 terms that were connected through 486 links met the criteria to be included in the network. As such, the network illustrated in Figure 2 presents the top areas of investigation covered by the studies included in the dataset.

Figure 2.

Most co-occurred terms in BIM literature.

Figure 3 illustrates clearer details of BIM neighbors in Figure 2.

Figure 3.

A clear illustration of BIM neighbors in the network.

In this network, the size of each node differentiates the prominent nodes.²⁷ Hence, the outcome of this text-mining analysis indicated the fact that compared to other areas of BIM research, liability has received less attention within the existing BIM body of knowledge. In this example, the term “BIM” is the greatest node. Three close neighbors of BIM are “Implementation,” “Adoption,” and “Construction Industry.” This reflects the dominant view in the literature. The links between any pair of nodes indicate two keywords that occur together in a single publication. Each link has a strength, represented by a positive numerical value. The higher this value, the stronger the link is. A thicker line between two nodes represents a stronger link between those two items.²⁴ In this map, minimum strength of lines is set to 1:00, so the weaker links are not displayed. The distances among nodes indicate the level of closeness of two nodes. Smaller distances show a stronger relationship among terms.²⁷

The links and the size of the nodes indicate the fact that BIM adoption and its implementation in organizations and projects have received more consideration. Moreover, the researchers have taken challenges, barriers to, and benefits of BIM implementation into consideration. Since Liability is not included in Figure 2, it can be inferred that liability is not among the influential streams of BIM research, although it is a key aspect of BIM in construction legal affairs. Design liability issue was found to be a concept in isolation with no strong connections to other key areas of BIM research. This was evidence of how existing literature on BIM has overlooked the role of liability in influencing other areas of BIM research.

In addition to this analysis, the betweenness centrality of each keyword was computed using Pajek in order to find out the keywords that play the largest role in the literature. In order to do this, the authors divided the bibliographic data into four groups based on the year of publication. Hence, there are four groups each encompassing 4 years as: 1) 2005–2008, 2) 2009–2012, 3) 2013–2016, and 4) 2017–2020. The results are shown in Table 1. This table illustrates the top 10 keywords with the highest betweenness centralities. A node with higher betweenness centrality connects more groups of keywords than a node with lower betweenness centrality.²³

Table 1.

Top 10 keywords ranked by betweenness centrality in different time frames.

Rank	2005–2008	2009–2012	2013–2016	2017–2020
1	Building Information Modelling (BIM) (0.275)	Building Information Modelling (BIM) (0.65)	Building Information Modelling (BIM) (0.789)	Building Information Modelling (BIM) (0.843)
2	3 days modelling (0.054)	Information And Communication Technology (ICT) (0.084)	Adoption (0.052)	Adoption (0.027)
3	Productivity (0.054)	Contract(s) (0.01)	Implementation (0.046)	Construction industry (0.026)
4		Collaboration (0.008)	Construction industry (0.025)	Implementation (0.015)
5		Implementation (0.006)	Information And Communication Technology (ICT) (0.019)	Contract(s) (0.007)
6		Hong Kong (0.004)	Project management (0.012)	Risk (0.006)
7		Construction industry (0.002)	Innovation (0.01)	Barriers (0.006)
8		Implementation strategies (0.001)	Contract(s) (0.009)	Architecture, Engineering And Construction (AEC) Industry (0.006)
9			Facilities Management (FM) (0.005)	Strategy (0.006)
10			Architecture (0.005)	Challenges (0.004)

According to this table, before 2008, there is a lack of attention to topics like contractual issues in BIM. After this time, subcategories in the field become increasingly diverse. From 2009 to 2012, contractual issues, BIM implementation process, and collaboration as a result of BIM implementation are covered in studies. The researchers during the next period, that is, from 2013 to 2016, have put even more emphasis on BIM adoption and implementation. From this table, it is obvious that during recent years, that is, after 2017, while BIM implementation and adoption remain important, growing attention to pros. and cons. of this process emerges. This is observable from betweenness centralities of the keywords Risk, Barriers, and Challenges; in fact, more studies stress the benefits of and barriers to BIM implementation. However, there is still a lack of attention to design issues, collaboration, or liability among these keywords.

Solutions to design liability issues in existing literature

To conduct this step of the research, the authors selected studies, among those 325 returned from Scopus, which satisfied two criteria described in what follows. First, the authors considered articles that were published through the last decade in order to include the most up to date publications; 311 cases satisfied this criterion. Then, the cases were required to consider Design Liability issue within their context; after studying the abstracts and manual screening of the issues mentioned in those 311 studies, 47 cases returned that satisfied this second criteria. Some of these studies have suggested solutions to Liability, which are introduced in the following paragraphs.

Studies suggested that in case of any professional liabilities, the architect/engineer would assume responsibility for its data input; the data provider is responsible for its duty and shall be liable for its input data. They suggested that the modelling deliverable and sharing shall be discussed in BIM execution plan, transferring the liability issue to the data provider.¹⁵ Other researchers have also considered the concept of addressing liability issue in project documents, such as contractual documents and Professional Indemnity Insurance,¹⁹ Ghaffarianhoseini et al.,¹⁸ Pandey et al.,²¹ Andre,²⁰ or BIM addendum as an additional rider to the contract.²⁸ If BIM standards and contract clauses regarding liability are set up, there will be fewer errors in populating the BIM model.¹⁶ Some details to be incorporated into such contracts are as follows:

The model(s) to be developed for the collaborative use of the team;

The parties responsible for preparing the model(s), and the required content;

Decisions made in the modelling process;

Allocation of the rights and responsibilities of the collaborators;

Delineation of the collaborators’ responsibilities and identifying who is responsible for errors allegedly; and

Addressing the means of authenticating collaborators.²⁹

Since the current legal system does not mandate collaboration or obligate contracting parties to stipulate collaboration in contracts, incorporating BIM-partnering approach in DBB (Design- Bid- Build) and DB (Design-Build) will obligate the contractor to share liability for the design model and make a strong environment of coordination.³⁰ Collaborative work and information sharing can be considered as solutions to liability issues.³¹ Motivating collaboration and responsibility and risk allocation can help overcome liability for design errors in BIM.³²

A different solution is to have an end user pulling the mandate for the model to be up-to-date. Since if there is nobody to check the updated model, it is unlikely that the original developing team will have any reason to keep it updated.¹⁶

Cohen⁸ introduced various methods for contractors to be able to manage the risk of liability:

Tighter contracts that clearly define what will and will not be offered as advice by the contractor.

Working with owners who are proficient with the building model utilization on projects.

The careful selection of experienced subcontractors and design professionals.

Another method that has helped contractors manage financial risks over the past several years has been contractor’s professional liability policies.

Hancock³³ suggested change management model and approach to identify design firm specific risks from liability changes and incorporate the proper procedure modifications to address these risks in the design firms’ culture. Modifying insurance to cover collaborative working practices was suggested by Mahamadu et al.³⁴

Hamdi and Leite¹⁷ proposed a management/audit system of all inputs into the BIM model that allocates the responsibilities between design consultants, constructors, and/or clients.

Liability in existing contractual standards

In this section, the authors have reviewed the contractual standards that are known to the construction society worldwide. These documents are the product of leading construction associations, dedicated to identifying and utilizing best practices in the construction industry for standard construction contracts. Moreover, these standards include BIM addendum, which might not be included in other contractual standards. Following is the result of this analysis.

The ConsensusDocs 301 BIM Addendum suggests that the full responsibility lies with the contractors for their own model contributions. However, liability is waived in case of any consequential damages resulting from the use of the building model data. Moreover, project parties are obliged to immediately report identified errors. On the other hand, most of the time, contractors can rely upon the sufficiency of the digital models provided by other participants. This contract addendum foresees a liability waiver for all damages due to the use of building data for any purpose other than that stated in the contract. ConsensusDocs 301 incorporates a provision to grant an extension of time to the participants to be able to address errors that did not result from their defaults.³⁵

BIM contract models by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) do not provide any solutions to liability issues. AIA Document G202 merely addresses one aspect relevant to liability. This document clarifies that project participants can only rely upon the level of detail (LOD) of the data provided by other participants. In this case, the data must be found according to defined project milestones rather than an actual advanced LOD of the existing data.³⁶

CIC suggests that project participants will not accept any liability for the model integrity if it is not the result of non-compliance with BIM protocols.³⁷

CIOB contract model introduces the model contributor as the responsible party for model integrity.³⁸

Liability in contract conditions of building information modelling projects

After reviewing BIM barriers in the literature, it is necessary to explore this issue in real projects. At this stage, the aim was retrieving studies which explored projects that implemented BIM in their practices to identify whether there have been conflicts concerning liability assignment. Therefore, different types of studies were reviewed including reports, published studies, and online articles. Four reports were identified including the reports by the AIA,³⁹ University of British Columbia,⁴⁰ Cheng,⁴¹ and Cohen.⁴² Published studies and online articles were identified through Citation Mining and a search on Google Scholar using keywords including: Building Information Modelling, BIM, Case Study, and Best Practices. In the initial research, 34 completed projects were retrieved, although not all of them were relevant to the aim of this study. Based on the retrieved results, the approach was narrowed to those that addressed BIM challenges, disputes and conflicts. Most of the studies had explored technical issues, hence, the authors decided to exclude these studies, and to include those exploring contractual challenges in BIM projects. These studies extracted BIM challenges from real BIM projects as well as contract provisions concerning Liability assignment issues. Accordingly, the authors identified 10 BIM projects and their contract terms regarding liability. The results are summarized in Table 2. The sources of the data are also provided in Table 2.

Table 2.

Contractual solutions for Liability in BIM projects.

No	References	Project title	Type of building	Location	Team members (no.)	Building area (m²)	Project budget ($m)	Start date	Finish date	Project delivery system	Contract conditions (Liability)
1	^39,41,43	SpawGlass Austin Regional Office	Office	Austin, Texas	16	15,370	2.8	2010	*	IPD	In this project, any liability for paying compensation, etc. with the objective of mitigating claims during project is overlooked. Only if one party (owner, contractor, or designer) causes an error due to negligence, bears responsibility for its cost
2	^39,41	Mercy Regional Medical Center (Renovation)	Healthcare	Lorain, Ohio	60	94,439	19.4	2010	2013	IPD	In this project, disputes between the architect and the contractor are overlooked. These disputes include the following: Compensations, rework due to defects, commitments not met, or insufficiencies without insurance coverage.The process of DR for other cases of conflict is that, first a DR committee is formed, and then the final decision is made unanimously.Noteworthy in this project is that any later-discovered defect or compensation, 10 years after project completion, is not traceable
3	^39,41	Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building	Office	Portland, Oregon	114	525,421	123.2	2009	2013	IPD	No liability limits are reflected in the contract, and no contract provisions are considered for litigation
4	⁴⁰	Cathay Pacific Cargo Terminal	Airport Terminal	Hong Kong	120	246,000	700	2010	2013	*	The contractor is the main party who bears responsibility for any potential defect or error, in this project
5	^40,44,45	Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley (SMCCV)	Healthcare	Castro valley, California	^a	230,000	320	2007	2012	IPD	Because of numerous parties involved (11 parties), prolonged negotiations are needed in order to reach a desirable agreement.In this project, all modelling parties had to review the model periodically, in order to make sure about authenticity of the data. This may seem to prolong the project, but since BIM had reduced project completion date, the project completed earlier than the specified deadline
6	⁴⁰	Capitol Theatre	Cultural	Alberta, Canada	^a	14,000	7	2010	2011	IPD	There were two disputes in this project: Model ownership and liability. There was not any clear provision that whether the contractor or the owner was responsible for compensation due to errors. Besides, additional costs were not allocated properly among parties
7	^40,46	Vancouver Convention Centre	Cultural	British Columbia	^a	1,100,000	883	2003	2009	DBB	Only structural model was created in this project when ambiguity in designers’ liability limits led to some problems. Furthermore, there was a need to control model accuracy considering two-dimensional (2D) designs of other parts of the project. One important dispute was the model ownership
8	^39,41,42	Autodesk Inc	Office	Waltham, Massachusetts	^a	55,000	13.4	2008	2009	IPD	In contracts between all parties, any liability in front of others is disclaimed, unless when the compensation is due to cheating, intentional abuse, or gross negligence
9	^40,47	University of Colorado-Denver, Research 2	Healthcare	Aurora, Colorado	^a	506,000	205.8	2006	2008	*	Because of novelty of processes in this project, there was a need to review 2D designs to ensure data precision. Later, this need decreased by development of an appropriate contractual language
10	¹	Sprint Center Arena	Sports Arena	Kansas City, Missouri	^a	693,000	198	2005	2007	CM at risk	First, a 2D model and then three-dimensional (3D) model were created separately. A person called Model Manager was assigned to identify potential errors in the two models. But, this took a long time and limited full realization of BIM efficiencies and usefulness

^aUnspecified.

These projects were from different regions; the construction and completion dates of them also vary and cover a period of approximately 10 years. Their type of building is also different. Therefore, considering the diversity of projects from different perspectives, several contractual conflicts can be identified by emphasizing the provisions concerning Liability assignment. These conflicts are mentioned in the following paragraphs.

A closer look at Table 2 reveals that in projects 2, 3, 6, and 8, the issues concerning liability were not reflected in the contract or were overlooked. In Project 1, the wrongdoer is generally identified responsible, which contradicts the cooperative nature of BIM projects. This is also seen in Project 4, where the contractor is solely responsible for compensating errors.

Regarding projects 5, 7, and 10, a lack of clear provision(s) concerning liability for errors has led to delay in reviewing the model and ensuring its accuracy. Finally, Project 9 faced this problem at first, but later, with more contractual transparency, this issue was partially resolved.

It should be noted that the analysis was carried out solely on the mentioned studies’ findings.

Conclusion

With the objective of identifying Design Liability as one of the challenges in adopting BIM, this article reviewed and analyzed different resources on BIM implementation as follows: 1) existing literature in the field, 2) contractual standards, and 3) BIM projects’ contract documents. Findings from the aforementioned sources indicate that liability has not yet driven a noteworthy change in BIM scholarship and practice. In the studies regarding liability, there is scarcely a clear and detailed solution for liability assignment. The lack of attention to liability could be found in two other groups of sources. Surveying contractual standards and BIM projects’ contractual conditions revealed that in most cases, liability of design errors is not clearly defined in contract provisions. Generally, contracts do not properly cover this issue, or they only imply that the party that should bear the cost is the same party who has been responsible for compensation. The allocation of responsibility is not clear and, in some projects, only one party bears responsibility which leads to problems itself. However, a limitation that the authors encountered was that most BIM project parties were reluctant to grant the authors with access to their projects’ documents. Hence, future researchers can direct their efforts toward investigating more contractual documents from more projects. Future research can also aim at defining solutions for liability or incorporating liability solutions in contractual provisions that properly allocate or share risk and liability among those responsible for it.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Tayebe Yavari Roushan

Maryam Alizadeh

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