Who is liable for a wrongly approved submittal?

What the review actually covers

Review is for conformance with the design intent of the contract documents. It is not a check of dimensions, quantities, fabrication techniques, coordination between trades, or means and methods — those stay with the contractor.

Nor does approval cure a deviation. If the submittal departs from the contract documents and the contractor did not specifically flag that departure in writing, the approval does not authorise it.

Where the protection ends

The limit of that protection was established in the hardest way possible. The 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse — 114 deaths — turned on a fabricator’s connection redesign shown on shop drawings that the engineer of record reviewed without re-analysis.

The doctrine since is consistent: stamp language reduces designer exposure, it does not eliminate it — especially where a shop drawing contains what is, in substance, a design change. A reviewer who lets a redesign pass as a routine submittal has not been protected by the stamp.

What this means in practice

The exposure on both sides is a detection problem: a deviation buried in a shop drawing that nobody flagged. That is precisely what machine reading is good at surfacing — every submittal checked against the specification, the drawings and the contract, with deviations raised for human attention and a person signing off on every code.

Terms

• Shop Drawing
• Submittal