Legal Aspects of The Built Environment Blog
EPA Crowdsourcing lead paint enforcement in New England Crowdsourcing The practice of outsourcing a job or task that is traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company to a non-organized, usually large group of people, generally in the form of an open call or competition. Note to self: Don’t break law in plain sight of your competition Late last year, I found a long version of a YouTube video showing two men dry-sanding a residence in Rockland, Maine. The video was shaky and amateurish but had a series of captions describing a fairly complete list of alleged violations of the EPA’s new RRP Rule, which mandates lead-safe paint removal practices on pre-1978 housing. I was searching for photos while updating a PowerPoint presentation on the Legal Aspects of the EPA Lead-Based Paint Renovation, Repair & Painting (RRP) Rule. I showed it to a group of contractors at my next seminar and …
Building Information Modeling Litigation Architectural Record reports that XL Insurance recently settled a messy case arising out of the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) to design and construct a life sciences building at a major university. XL representatives would not name the parties involved but commented on the dispute to make people aware of the risks of BIM. The dispute centers on the lack of communication between the designers of the BIM model and the subcontractors actually responsible for performing the work – in this case the MEP contractor. The BIM model’s tolerances for spacing in the plenum were very tight but the nature of the restriction was not communicated properly to the MEP contractor. After the mechanicals were about 70% complete using normal sequencing, it dawned on everyone that they were out of space. Apparently, the design team did not communicate to the contractor that the very tight tolerances …
Door-to-Door Sales and the FTC Home Solicitation Sales Act So a contractor gets a call from a frantic homeowner in Massachusetts. She pleads with the contractor to come out right away and fix something. She says it is an emergency! The CNN “Severe Weather Forecast” predicted more heavy snow and warned that some roofs may need to be shoveled off. The contractor arrives to check out the situation; there is no real emergency but the owner is plainly motivated to hire the contractor to do building maintenance tasks right away. On the spot, the contractor sees an opportunity to make an easy buck, writes out a contract for $999, the owner happily signs (after all, she thinks it is an emergency), and the contractor gets started right away. Either not thinking about it or thinking that a) because the cost of the job was under $1,000; or b) because the services were …