General planner contract

General planner contract

In many larger construction projects today, numerous engineers, architects and special experts no longer work side by side. Comparable to the general contractor contract in the area of construction services, as a general planner you provide your client with all or at least the basic planning and supervision services from a single source. For this purpose, as a general planner you regularly conclude subcontractor agreements with the special experts required for the realisation of the building project, such as structural engineers, soil experts, specialist engineers for sound and heat insulation, technical building equipment (TGA) and fire protection.

By concluding these subcontractor agreements, you as the general planner regularly find yourself in a kind of tension relationship. As a result, you enter into legally binding obligations both vis-a-vis the client under the general planning contract and vis-a-vis the subcontractors under the subcontracts. We support you by drafting, reviewing and negotiating the general planning agreement and its annexes, so that your legal interests are protected in both directions in the best possible way.

For example, you should agree in the general planning contract for which services you will call in special experts and which sub-planners you will use for the construction project. We also advise you to include a provision in the general planning contract on the performance of partial acceptances, which grants you the right to separate acceptance of the individual services of the sub-planners vis-a-vis the client. Finally, clear regulations on copyrights are also important.

In this context, we therefore also support you in drafting, negotiating and concluding the individual subcontractor agreements. In doing so, we pay particular attention to ensuring that you achieve congruence between the sub-planner and general planner contracts with regard to deadlines, construction cost specifications and the other parameters of the construction project. In addition, we carefully check the scope of coverage of the professional liability insurances of the individual sub-planners for you, so that you do not have any gaps in the possibilities of recourse against the sub-planners at your expense. We also take care of contractual regulations regarding the due date of your fee, because in practice you regularly have to pay the fees of your sub-planners in advance before you receive the remuneration for these services from your client.