Quantifying Liability Under the Architect's Standard of Care

In recent years, architects and other design professionals have become the targets of claims arising from problems encountered in construction projects. In addition to incurring the costs of defending such claims, these design professionals (or their insurers) have often found themselves absorbing the liability for many "errors and omissions" that are difficult to defend when individually excerpted from a substantial project. This treatment of claims for defective design reflects a distortion of the architect's professional standard of care that is justified neither by the contractual liability assumed by the architect nor by the economic balance among the parties involved in a construction project.