Hi,
I have a question regarding the "Liability of the LEED Consultant":
A contract has been signed between a LEED consultant and the client in order to obtain a LEED certification for the project. No LEED level has been specified within the contract.
Throughout the process, the LEED consultant has done the paper work for some of the credits (Let's say 4/8 of the compulsory and the 20/43 optional ones; which equals to 35 documented points).
In the middle of the LEED process the client has changed his mind and wanted to cancel the contract for some reasons.
50% of the contract price has already been paid to the LEED consultant and 50% of the money has not been left.
How do we decide about the percentage of the work that the LEED consultant has completed and how do we make sure whether the LEED consultant received the right amount of money?
Could this be calculated by the credits that have been worked and documented on (in this case 24/51) or could this be by the number of points that the contractor have completed out of 110 (in this case 35/110)?
I look forward to receiving your ideas regarding this case.
Best regards,
Marcus Sheffer
LEED Fellow7group / Energy Opportunities
LEEDuser Expert
5867 thumbs up
May 12, 2017 - 12:04 pm
Consultants typically bill for their time. Not all LEED credits take the same amount of the time to document. So it is not fair to base it on credits completed. You are also not factoring time which will need to be spent replying to the comments.
I might be biased as a consultant by the only fair way to do this in my mind is based on the hours spent by the consultant relative to the hours they estimated for the job.
Scott Bowman
LEED FellowIntegrated Design + Energy Advisors, LLC
LEEDuser Expert
519 thumbs up
May 12, 2017 - 2:18 pm
I am also a consultant and agree with Marcus (as usual). Typically a consultant should have an estimate of scope and tasks, even if it as not shared directly during the contract negotiation. They should also be able to provide the number of hours and the cost they have incurred to date. It would be fair to pay them for time expended to date. There is a lot of up-front work that does not end up in the documents, so judging just by credits and documentation is not fair to them.
Ayton Tan
May 13, 2017 - 7:45 am
Dear Marcus, Scott and others,
Thanks very much for your reply.
Within the contract the LEED consultant have estimated that the service period for the certification process would be 12 months.
However, actual time invested by the LEED consultant cannot be demonstrated. The only data that we have is the documentation of some of the worked credits (35 points and 24 credits).
What would you advise based on this?
Scott Bowman
LEED FellowIntegrated Design + Energy Advisors, LLC
LEEDuser Expert
519 thumbs up
May 14, 2017 - 9:43 am
Ayton, I may be misreading your tone, but it seems you have some trust issues with this consultant. You seem to be wanting to determine what you will offer instead of discussing what they expended. There is no overall guide to what documentation and consultation require in hours or cost as it depends so much on the person's background and experience. My advice is to have an honest discussion with the Principal of the firm and come to an agreement on fair compensation. If I was the consultant, I would be able to show you my hourly budget that was done as part of my proposal and have a very accurate time log of hours expended to show on where we were at.
Now, that is where the honest negotiation must come in. There are times that we do not estimate well in our budget which means that we are headed toward going over our lump sum fee. As someone that has done this for my whole career, I have a good feeling of that at any point in the project and would honestly tell you where I am at, and offer some sort of fee that is fair to you but may not cover all my costs. Same goes the other way, of course, sometimes we are doing better than our budget and while it would be nice to get some profit at that point, typically I would just ask you to cover my hourly cost to date (which includes a fixed but fairly low margin).