Infrastructure Partners Nancy Smith and Patricia de la Peña Quoted in ENR on Design-Build Risk Management

Nancy Smith and Patricia de la Peña—Partners in Nossaman’s Infrastructure Practice Group—were quoted in the ENR article Risk Management a Hot Topic at DBIA Annual Meeting. The article provides an overview of topics discussed at Design-Build Institute of America’s (DBIA) 2018 annual meeting, where Ms. Smith and Ms. de la Peña were panelists. One of the topics panelists discussed  was the issue of how to assign appropriate risks to appropriate  parties during the design-build process. Ms. de la Peña, discussing the example of pre-existing hazardous material conditions, asked should we really shift that risk to the contractor…An agency has to ask what the cost is in shifting a risk that nobody can really control. Commenting on the same topic, Ms. Smith noted "that some DB contracts include ‘bands’ where a certain amount of dollars or days of risk are borne by the DB team. After that, the risk is split with the owner, and after another amount of time or money, the risk goes back to the owner.