Knowledge Center

Every Pricing Model Is an Answer to One Question: Who Eats the Overrun? Welcome to The Owner’s Contract Playbook, a new series for building owners on winning the contract game. Our Foundations Series ended with the owner’s three big decisions; this series starts with...

Delivery Methods, Procurement, and the Return of the Master Builder Series finale. Before a single drawing exists, an owner makes three decisions: how to package the project, how to pick the builder, and how to price the risk. Those decisions, made on the calmest day...

Quantum Meruit, Unjust Enrichment, and the Bid You Can’t Take Back Courts enforce three kinds of obligations no one ever wrote down: contracts implied from conduct, “contracts” the law invents to stop unjust enrichment, and bids made irrevocable because someone relied...

The Almost-Contract: Agreements to Agree, LOIs, and Deals Half-Made Judge Richard Posner called this “one of the most difficult areas of contract law,” and it is where construction deals actually live: term sheets, letters of intent, authorizations to proceed, and...

The Mating Dance: Offers, Acceptances, and the Contracts You Sign by Accident Courts describe contract formation as a “mating dance,” and on a construction project the dance has strict steps: who offered, who accepted, and whether the two ever actually matched. Miss a...

Hostages, Wax Seals, Handshakes, and the Deal You Didn’t Know You Made The law has spent three thousand years answering one question: which promises count? The answers, hostages, seals, peppercorns, and reliance, still decide construction cases today, including...

Six Bodies of Law, One Gordian Knot Ask what “construction law” is and most people guess “contract law for buildings.” That answer misses five-sixths of the field, and the missing five-sixths is usually where an owner’s case is won. By M. Colby Lewis, Construction...

The Death of the Master Builder, and the Birth of a “Separate Breed of Animal” An American court once compared a construction project to the middle of a battlefield. It was not exaggerating. Here is why building disputes have their own law, their own courts in some...

And the Birth of Construction Law How building made us human, from the first temples to the modern skyline, and why the law has always asked the same question: who bears the risk when the work fails? By M. Colby Lewis, Construction Defect Attorney, The Law Offices of...

A plain-English glossary of the words builders, contracts, and courtrooms use, for people who have never picked up a trowel. From The Law Offices of Colby Lewis, Houston, Texas. Every trade has its own language, and construction has more of it than most. Walk onto a...

Short answer: Design-Bid-Build gives the owner the most control over design and pricing, but it splits responsibility between a separate architect and contractor, which is where most disputes start. Design-Build trades some of that control for speed and a single point...

There is no fixed timeline for resolving a construction defect lawsuit in Houston. A relatively straightforward dispute may settle within several months, particularly when the contractor acknowledges the problem and agrees to make adequate repairs. A contested case...