How construction teams review subcontracts at volume

The thing you check a subcontract against changes with every job. It comes out of the prime contract the owner handed you, and on the next project that document says something different.

That is what makes contract review odd at a general contractor. At a lot of companies a review playbook is a standing set of positions you hold no matter who is across the table. On a GC's desk, half your positions get handed to you at award. Insurance limits, notice windows, schedule and delay terms, payment timing. The owner set those for this job. Every subcontract, purchase order and change order underneath has to line up with them, and none of your other jobs care.

So the real review question is narrower than it looks. Does this sub agreement match job 4417?

What the paper stack looks like after award

A job puts out far more paper after award than before it. One prime contract, then a subcontract for every trade you buy out, exhibits and riders hanging off each one, purchase orders for material, insurance certificates that are supposed to track what the subcontract says, and change orders that keep arriving until closeout.

A contracts group covering eight or ten live jobs is working through hundreds of documents a month. Nearly all of it sits downstream of a prime contract somebody read carefully once, months ago.

Where the review hours actually go

Two things eat the day.

The first is finding the governing language. The prime is a stack of its own: the agreement, the general conditions, the owner's special provisions, and whatever got redlined during the negotiation. When a sub asks to change their notice window, answering that takes a trip back through all of it. In a 2018 survey of roughly 600 construction professionals by PlanGrid and FMI, respondents said they spent about five and a half hours a week looking for project data. That survey covered drawings and cut sheets more than contracts, but contract documents get hunted down the same way.

The second is that the checking is repetitive. Twelve subcontracts on a job means twelve times somebody confirms that the insurance limits, the notice windows, the retainage and the change order procedure all match what the prime says. None of that is hard. It just drifts by the twelfth repetition on a Thursday afternoon.

Arcadis's contract solutions people, writing for CMAA, put inadequate project management and a lack of proper documentation among the causes of construction disputes their survey respondents name most often, alongside contracts that two reasonable people read two different ways. Both of those show up long after signing, in how the paper gets administered.

Build the job list once, then check everything against it

At award, before any sub paper moves, pull the prime apart into a short list of the terms your downstream documents have to carry. Write down the actual numbers and deadlines, in a form someone can check a document against. Insurance limits and the additional insured wording. Notice periods and who they go to. Payment timing and retainage. The change order procedure and what documentation it requires. Schedule and liquidated damages. Records and audit obligations.

Ten or twenty lines. That is your playbook for this job and no other job.

Then every downstream document gets checked against that list instead of against somebody's memory of the prime. That is a comparison task, and comparison is the part AI review handles reasonably well: pull the terms out of the subcontract, sit them next to the job list, flag what does not line up or is missing. Software will not tell you whether a mismatch is worth fighting over. Your contracts manager decides that. If you are already running an AI first pass on incoming contracts, the job list is the thing to feed it, because a generic company playbook can happily pass a subcontract that is clean everywhere except on this project.

Change orders are where the list earns its keep

Subcontracts get real attention because they get signed when everyone is still paying attention. Change orders get less of it, and there are far more of them. Each one is a small amendment that can quietly drop a notice requirement, stretch a payment term, or add scope you have no matching change order with the owner for.

Running a change order against the job list takes seconds when the list exists and a good deal longer when it does not. It is also the check most likely to get skipped in a busy month, which is why it belongs in the workflow as a step instead of depending on who is being careful that week.

One number worth tracking

Count how many subcontracts and change orders went out carrying a term that did not match the job list. Sample ten a month and you will know within a quarter whether the list is doing anything.

If you are also sorting a mixed intake queue, the four routes we use for triage will tell you which documents got a real read and which got waved through. The waved-through pile is worth sampling first.

Try goHeather free and run one subcontract against your job list to see what comes back.

This is legal information, not legal advice; consult a lawyer for legal advice.