Building Information Modelling: The Legal Frontier - Overcoming Legal and Contractual Obstacles

May Winfield

January 2015

A paper based on the highly commended entry in the Hudson Prize essay competition 2014

Driven by the Government's 2011 Construction Strategy requirement for the industry to move towards BIM, its implementation is gathering pace and throws up a host of interesting legal challenges. May Winfield's paper seeks to set out a contractual framework or checklist of contract terms for use in any BIM-enabled project.

A. What is BIM? - B. The existing standard form contracts and BIM - C. Necessary clauses for a BIM-supportive contract - 1. Clauses relating to process and data - 2. Clauses relating to interoperability - 3. Clauses relating to standardisation and consistency - 4. Clauses relating to copyright and ownership issues - 5. Clauses relating to risk allocation - 6. Clauses relating to encouraging collaboration - 7. Clauses relating to standard of care - 8. Other legal clauses - D. Conclusion.

The author: May Winfield is a specialist construction and insurance solicitor at Kennedys, solicitors, in London.

Text: 16 pages