Best Practices Construction Law : Construction Lawyer & Attorney : Matthew DeVries : Stites & Harbison Law Firm : Green Building & LEED Litigation

Aside from some personal quiet time to reflect on the day ahead, my second favorite part of the early morning is to review my RSS fees to see what may have happened in the prior 24 hours.  It's a sickness.  I know.  

I always find at least one golden nugget of information that may be useful in my professional or personal life.  Sometimes it is breaking news about a green construction issue.  Sometimes it is strange.  And sometimes it is simply entertaining.

In any event, I want to begin sharing with you some of these TOP TWEETS, which are determined during my morning review of the prior day's Tweets and based on my sole discretion. There's no formula or selection criteria.  You may agree or disagree with my choices.  That's okay.  You may choose to send me links.  That's okay, too.

And so, here are some Top Tweets for June 21, 2010:

• Top Tweet LEED: 5 Reasons Why GRI is the New LEED: Many reporting guidelines focus primarily on environmental issues because energ... http://bit.ly/azSxlM (via @thegreengod)
• Top Tweet BIM: Canadian Construction Association to form new BIM organization http://tinyurl.com/2fweghk (via @DenyseGall)
• Top Tweet Construction: Really hates construction law. (via @seraphiel10) (apparently someone studying construction law in Singapore)

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Tweet ... Tweet ... Tweet!  No, I am not cat-calling or whistling at you.  I am tweeting from the ABA Forum on the Construction Industry's annual meeting in Austin, Texas.  The program chairs have set up a Twitter account for the conference.  You can follow @forumaustin or search the hashtag #forumaustin.  If you want to follow my Tweets, you can do so at @matthewdevries.  Also, make sure to send me an email or message if you want to meet up.  And now, to the program schedule:

The Age of Turbulence: Managing Money Issues in Construction

1. From Project Concept to Funding: Where Do You Get the Money?
2. Shaking hte Money Tree: Funding Our Way Out of the Infrastructure Crisis
3. The Inside and Out of Public Private Partnerships
4. Foreign Exchange: The 10 Commandments for Successful Execution of International EPC Projects
5. Accounting for Construction Lawyers
6. Realizing "Value" from Value Engineering: Costs, Benefits and Legal Issues
7. Damages Beyond the Contract: Tort and Statutory Liabilty for Architects, Engineers and Contractors
8. The AACE Recommended Practice for Forensic Schedule Analysis
9. Pursuing Payment: Damned if You; Damned if You Don't
10. Walking the High Wire While Juggling: Strategies to Manage Litigation Costs and Meet Client Expectations
11. Law and Life Series: Making the Business Case for Diversity in the Practice of Constructoin Law
12. Consequential Damages in the Current Economic Climate: A Guide to Recovery and Avoidance
13. Pre- and Post-Judgment Collection Remedies: Show Me the Money!
14. When to Terminate the Client: It's An Ethical Question

That's a packed schedule for three days.  Let me know if there is a specific session you want me to attend.  I will be your proxy and do a special post on Friday.

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I have my Google reader set to search various blogs, news sites, and Twitter feeds to help me keep current with the latest trends in the construction industry.  There remains one major problem: the words we use have different meanings for everyone.  

Take, for example, my search of Twitter feeds (above) for Building Information Modeling (BIM).  If you were to do the same search during a weekday morning, the majority of results would return various individuals involved in some aspect of the construction industry either praising or criticizing BIM. Now, if you were to do the same search on any given Friday or Saturday night, you might be surprised to get a varied assortment of results (and photographs) of individuals out for a night of partying.  You see, BIM is also slang for "bimbo" or ... how do I say this ... a "lady with questionable morals"? 

What's the lesson here?  Did you click on this article because you thought it related to LEED or Green Buildings?  It kinda does.  It kinda doesn't.  The lesson is that we live and work in a world where information spreads quickly.  In addition, we have become informal in our communications through the use of email, texting and Twitter.  (And in our personal lives, there may not be anything wrong with informality in our communications.)

However, the construction project is built on expectations and performance.  Where those expectations are accurately and correctly reduced to a writing, the parties have a written contract.  Where the parties use words that have different meanings (and both interpretations are reasonable), we now have an ambiguity.  A judge or arbitrator will then be asked to interpret that ambiguity based upon any number of legal tools (i.e., parties' words and conduct, other writings outside the four cornings of the contract, industry norms, etc.).  As the construction industry begins to employ new technologies, such as BIM, or new performance based goals, such as energy performance from a LEED certified building, then it becomes even more important that we use words that do not lead to miscommunication.

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