“Who’s this guy?”
That’s
the look I got from some folks and it’s a look I knew all too well. I flashed it
many times as an onsite project engineer and project manager. On one particular
jobsite I was on, we would joke about the starched white shirt/pressed jeans
guys who would be posted up in the trailer conference room occasionally for
matters that were above our pay grade. For
the first time a few weeks ago, I was one of those guys as I spent my first
prolonged period of time on a large jobsite since becoming an attorney.
I
was sent to the South to a large industrial project that was just reaching
critical mass of construction operations with over 700 tradesmen onsite and
multiple shifts running 7 days a week. As
I walked onsite and into the trailer complex, the intensity and buzz of the
site was palpable, and it surprised me how much I missed that aspect of
construction. My role for the week was
to simply begin compiling facts in order to status certain contracts for the
owner. I did this through collecting
documents and interviews with the owner’s supervisory field staff. At first, I had some difficulty in my new
role as a passive observer rather than a proactive participant in the actual
building operations. I found myself at times having to suppress the
construction manager remnants of my brain when process and future operational
concerns were being discussed. I reminded
myself that I was no longer a field guy and in my current capacity, I
needed to dial it back to stick to the
task at hand of information gathering, not getting into fervent discussions of panel
attachment details and efficient trade sequencing.
Through
the contract document review I conducted prior to arriving onsite, I knew the
contractual relationships and who might be in trouble. The office I was placed in was located next
to the large general conference room where marathon coordination meetings were
taking place and I worked with the door open in order to better understand the
project. Knowing who was in the
crosshairs, there were times when I winced at things said from an owner standpoint,
and at other times when subcontractors were speaking I wanted to yell out the
door, ‘SOMEONE WRITE THAT DOWN! WE’LL NEED THAT LATER!”
By
the end of the week, I had slipped back into the comfortable rhythm of a
jobsite, something that is missing in an office environment. There are times of the day that have certain feels
to them; the sacrosanct coffee break, the quiet, almost peaceful lull of lunch,
and wrap up time in the late afternoon as the shadows get longer. A few days, I found myself out on the deck
watching the tradesmen file out of the gate and thought wistfully of my time
spent onsite and how I might want to get back into it. Then I would snap back with the reality of the
monumental task and the crushing and all-consuming pressure this team would
experience over the next year in order to complete the project on time.
Accordingly, I quickly remembered why I made the decision to go to law
school. I found that jobsites and their
intensity are a nice place to visit, but me and my starched shirts had a plane
to catch to get back to the office to start reviewing documents and begin
writing.
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The
author, Brendan Carter, is a contributor to The Dispute Resolver and a former
Student Division Liaison to the Forum on Construction Law. He is an attorney and a Senior Consultant
with Navigant’s Global Construction Practice based out of Boston, MA. He may be contacted at 617.748.8311 or
brendan.carter@navigant.com.
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