I am in California in one of the most litigation heavy states in the country and if not the most in the world. I use the California Land Surveyors Association Contract. However, it does favor the surveyor heavily, so I have modified it to be more fair between surveyor and client. Nevertheless, I feel very protected by it and my insurance carriers give me a better rate knowing I use this and I'm sure my attorneys will have am easier time if we ever are in litigation ourselves. The contract has provisions in it based on many common issues that have arisen in the past. One such provision is the case where clients are responsible for paying the full contract amount when they "pull the plug" for receiving results that are not necessarily favorable to them. As surveyors we are obligated to file Corner Records or Record of Surveys while in the process of a field survey we find material discrepancy or material evidence that has not been recorded on a map. So the issue is our ethical and legal responsibility per the PLS Act and we must file the Record of Survey and why should we have to foot the bill if the client doesn't like the results? Not fair, so they must pay us to do the work they originally contracted us to do because the PLS Act does not give us an exception based on if client pays or not. This is one recent example of many of course. People are sue happy in California and especially Marin County where I do most of my work, maybe if I lived in a conservative state I would be more comfortable with the one page contract. There are some interesting people around here and properties are in the millions. More money more problems. I agree if we are signing contracts for bigger firms we should forward that stuff over to our insurance carriers. Thanks.
One such provision is the case where clients are responsible for paying the full contract amount when they "pull the plug" for receiving results that are not necessarily favorable to them.
I think that would run afoul of the everyday theft of services law that seems to exist everywhere.
My brother (not a surveyor) just ran into this with his business. He had a 130k project with a guy and did 100k of work (owner paid) when the owner decided to try to stiff him on the last 30k. He started looking into the guy and here he's had multiple felonies for scamming people, the IRS was after him for a while, etc.
Even if you have a solid contract you can run into people like this.