Some owners try to shift all responsibility to the design professional and the contractor, even in cases where the owner is directly responsible for delay or defective work. This strategy is appealing to owners, but not always successful, as courts regularly overrule contract provisions that are grossly unfair, especially when written by one of the parties to the contract. Design professionals used to working with standard documents often overlook these provisions, which leads to conflicting information in their specifications. Large owners and government agencies introduce problems by trying to specify mandated employment requirements, such as prevailing wages and hiring quotas. As if that weren't annoying enough, they sometimes like to throw in a variety of irrelevant policy statements and quotations from statutes, just to keep things interesting.
Some organizations assign responsibility for construction projects to the purchasing department.
These are people who spend most of their time buying pencils and paper clips. They also shouldn't write 30 pages of supplementary conditions to modify a standard document. The confusion that results from using unusual conditions is difficult to justify. In their defense, some owners may include specifications in their contract conditions because of unfortunate experiences with design professionals who did a poor job with Division 1 General Requirements and other specification sections. And it is possible that an owner may have procedural requirements or a delivery method so unique that standard conditions simply won't work.