A201 - Table of Articles

So as we've mentioned, when we're talking about contracts, there's a lot of information that needs to be defined or delineated in some way, otherwise it's just too hard to put everything all together into one spot. So you have to spread it out a little bit, and that's what the A201 is for. So the A201 is the document that allows for everything else to be a little bit simpler. So the A101, the owner contractor agreement, that's gonna be a little bit simpler because all of the definitions and all of the sort of specific aspects can be listed in the A201, and it can just really focus on the main contractual relationships, and anything that needs to be referenced back just gets referenced over to the appropriate section of the A201.

Same thing with the B101, the owner architect agreement, that contract can be sort of just specific to the contractual relationships and all those other things, like what is a contractor? What is the work?

All of that kind of stuff can get defined somewhere else, and that's the A201. So there's a lot of information in the A201, and there's a bunch of places where you can alter it and add information and give more information into it so that it's specific to this particular project. But essentially, it's the big spot where all the definitions and all that legalese can happen without it sort of swamping the various contracts, so the contracts can remain at least reasonably simple. But what that means is that the A201 is a big document, and it's a big, long, it's 30 some pages, there are situations where it might be 40, 50, 60 pages once you start including everything in terms of exhibits and other stuff.

So it's a big, long contract document, but interestingly, nobody signs it. It's a contract, but it's not a signed contract and that's because it's incorporated by reference into all of the other contracts, so it's mentioned in all the other contracts.

When both parties sign those other contracts, one of the things that's mentioned in there is the A201, and so therefore, they are signing that they are agreeing to the fact that the A201 is actually part of this contract that they're signing. Everybody else is agreeing to it as well, like you have a whole family of contracts, maybe with the GC to the sub, or the architect to the consultant, if everybody's using the same family of contracts, then everybody is signing on to the A201.

So you'll see that the A201 is actually made specific to the project, most of it, vast majority of it, is all set in stone and you just kind of use it as is, but there's little places where you can alter it and change it for that particular project, in order to make sure that it sort of makes sense in this context. So if we take a look at the table of contents, it'll start giving us a pretty good idea of all the things that are going on here.

So we have the general provisions, which is going to include various definitions and things like that, then we get into the issues of the owner, the contractor, and the architect, and then we start getting into the sub-contractors and other consultants, and then we get into construction. If things aren't constructed in sort of a normal pattern, what do we do for changes in work, for change orders and construction change directives, how schedule and time work, how the payments and completion of the project works, safety issues, protection of project, like sometimes you have to have, let's say, protection of all the trees around the project.

You don't want the trucks running over their roots or something like that, well this is how you talk about protection and how you talk about safety issues, how everybody's insurance is going to relate to each other, how things will be discussed and talked about if something goes wrong or new information is found. Maybe they're doing excavation and there's a oil tank suddenly below grade that nobody knew was there, so how do we deal with that?

Well, we're gonna figure it out by talking about correction of work and uncovering work. All sorts of stuff will be listed out and delineated here that then helps explain all those other contracts. So as we start to run through it, the first thing you'll notice is in the index, because it's referencing to all of these different contracts, there's a whole series of ways that it's talking about all of that information so that people can find the appropriate piece of information quickly and easily, 'cause it's not just a standalone document, it has to be able to be understood by lots of different people all through these multitude ways that it gets referenced from one contract to another.

So you have this whole index here, which I point out is many pages long, so that's a lot of information about just helping people track down where the information they're looking for is.

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