EJCDC E-530: Agreement Between Owner and Geotechnical Engineer for Professional Services (2024)

EJCDC® E‑530, Agreement between Owner and Geotechnical Engineer for Professional Services, is a standard agreement for a project owner’s direct engagement of the services of a geotechnical engineering firm or individual geotechnical engineer. It is common practice for project owners to directly engage the services of a geotechnical engineering firm (or individual) whose basic task will be to investigate the subsurface condition of the site and prepare a Geotechnical Report for the design engineer’s use in designing the project. The Geotechnical Report is usually also made available to prospective construction contractors and subcontractors for use in preparing bids and proposals, and to the selected construction contractor for reference during construction.

EJCDC® E-530, Agreement Between Owner and Geotechnical Engineer for Professional Services, 2024 Edition is a comprehensive update of the EJCDC Owner’s professional services agreement for geotechnical services and remains consistent with the overall content, risk allocations, and philosophical approach of the document’s prior version. However, E-530 2023 has been substantially reorganized for consistency with EJCDC’s other professional services agreements and has been updated to include additional practice content and user guidance.

E-530 2024 closely follows the most recent edition of EJCDC® E-500, Agreement Between Owner and Engineer for Professional Services, 2020 Edition, both in terms of substantive contractual content and structure/organization. To reflect evolving contract practice and improve ease of use, EJCDC made a substantial effort to enhance and re-organize E-500’s exhibits and those improvements have been carried through to the E-530 update, as applicable to geotechnical practice.

A new Main Agreement Article 9 “Special Geotechnical Provisions” has been created in E-530 to help users more easily address general agreement matters and terms that are unique and specific to the Geotechnical Engineer – Owner relationship.  The “Special Geotechnical Provisions” identifies and modifies the Owner – Engineer standard agreement clauses (from E-500) that apply only to the Geotechnical Engineer.  Article 9 also can include certain key technical requirements to assure those matters are covered when the parties are using a custom scope attachment rather than EJCDC’s Exhibit A Scope of Services.

The most notable other additions and clarifications to the update include:

• Acknowledgement that project-related Management of Geotechnical Engineer’s Services is an important part of the standard scope of services, and assigning it a specific section under Basic Services;
• Enhanced guidance on establishing the baseline scope of services with detailed provisions to update required geotechnical services as the actual site conditions become known or change;
• Expanded scope listing and rates schedule for types of geotechnical analyses/tests to be considered by users;
• More comprehensive utility coordination language for physical investigations at the site, addressing notification/coordination with utility owners, utility information sharing, and utility damage mitigation and prevention;
• An improved process for coordination of geotechnical services with third party contractors during the construction phase;
• New, stand-alone Deliverables Schedule to combine schedule information into one exhibit and better reflect typical user schedule development practice;
• Addition of Pollution Liability Insurance in the insurance table as a coverage option reminder to users, together with line item options for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Cyber Liability insurance when these coverages are applicable to the geotechnical services;
• Clarification of payment and expense provision language;
• Inclusion of an Electronic Documents Protocol (EDP) exhibit to promote and manage use of electronic documents among the project parties;
• Relocation and re-naming of various exhibits to match recent updates of other EJCDC professional services agreements and user practices.

E-530 2024 is packaged in two parts: (1) The Main Agreement and (2) The Exhibits.   As with E-500, the 2024 edition of E-530 is published as two separate Word files, one file containing the Main Agreement form and the second file containing the Exhibits (A through J). Both files contain integral building blocks of an Engineer – Geotechnical Engineer contract, and each E-530 purchase will result in transmittal (download) to the purchaser of both files.

Because most users develop the Main body of the agreement separately from the scope, schedule, cost and other project attachments, delivery of E-530 in two manageably sized files is consistent with common practice and project customization.  After all editing has been completed (in Word) in for each part of the agreement, each of the two files can be converted to a PDF, and as the final step the two PDF files can then be merged into a single contract document, in PDF.