By Michael C. Loulakis, Esq., FDBIA, M.ASCE, and John M. Neary, Esq., M.ASCE
For engineers and preconstruction teams, Korte Construction Co. v. Secretary of the Army offers a practical warning about design-document coordination in projects that rely on bridging documents. On those types of projects, specifications, legends, and drawings often express design intent without fully resolving every detail, which makes it especially important to identify inconsistencies before pricing and award.
In this case, the court treated the contract documents as one integrated package and refused to let the contractor disregard a requirement simply because part of it appeared mistaken or impossible. The practical lesson is straightforward: If utility drawings, notes, and specifications do not align, the safest course is to raise the issue and document the clarification before bid assumptions harden into contractual risk.
The case
This case arose from a dispute over whether a federal contract required installation of chilled water utility improvements at a hangar at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. The Army procured the project using a design-build format supported by bridging documents. That delivery structure can be efficient, but it creates an environment in which specifications, utility legends, conceptual plans, and narrative requirements may not line up perfectly. The central issue in this case was whether those imperfectly coordinated materials nonetheless imposed a real contractual obligation.
The Army solicitation called for utility work that included extension of chilled water, hot water, and compressed air piping to the slab edge of the hangar as well as a connection point for future projects. The problem, however, was that no base-wide chilled water loop existed from which the chilled water line could actually be extended. Korte later relied heavily on that fact, arguing that the requirement could not have been intended as written because it referred to infrastructure that did not exist in the field.
But the contract package did not stop with that one practical inconsistency. Other parts of the procurement materials, including drawings and legends, depicted chilled water lines and related appurtenances in a way that suggested the owner still expected some form of chilled water utility installation as part of the hangar project. Korte submitted its proposal without taking exception to the solicitation, and its own proposal drawings reflected the chilled water utility work shown in the package.
After award, the Army revised the project and deleted the chilled water lines and valve vault, then issued a unilateral modification, removing $493,639 in scope from Korte on the premise that the deleted work had already been included in the contract price. Korte responded that the Army was not deleting existing scope at all because the original contract never validly required the chilled water work. In Korte’s view, the specification’s reference to a nonexistent system and the lack of precise graphic clarity on the drawings meant there was no enforceable requirement.
The Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals disagreed, concluding that the chilled water work was part of the award and that any inconsistency or uncertainty should have been raised before bid submission. Korte lost at the board because it tried to bid around an obvious problem in the solicitation, stayed quiet, and then fought to keep nearly $500,000 for work that the board said the contract had required all along. The core issue in the case was contract interpretation and Korte’s failure to raise the problem before bidding.
The ruling
The Federal Circuit affirmed the board and held that the chilled water work was part of the awarded contract, which meant the Army was entitled to a credit when that work was later removed. The court’s reasoning is significant because it was not based on the perfection of any one sheet or note. Instead, it applied a familiar but often decisive interpretive principle: Contract documents must be read as a whole, and the interpretation adopted should, if reasonably possible, effectuate all provisions rather than nullify one of them.
Under that approach, the written specification calling for chilled water piping to the slab edge and provision for a future connection point could not simply be ignored because the surrounding circumstances made the requirement awkward or because one might suspect that the owner had drafted it imperfectly.
In Korte, the drawings were not flawless, but they still reinforced the overall conclusion that the chilled water work was included in the contract and Korte had to flag any obvious problem or ambiguity before bidding because the legends and utility depictions aligned with the written requirement strongly enough to show intended work. The court therefore declined to let graphic imperfection defeat the broader contractual reading.
This case illustrates that there is no license to disregard an express requirement that appears questionable on its face. The Federal Circuit treated the inconsistency here as patent, meaning sufficiently obvious that a reasonable bidder should have recognized the need to ask questions before pricing the work. Once an ambiguity is patent, the burden shifts in a practical sense: Rather than permitting a later claim based on the bidder’s preferred interpretation, the law expects the bidder to seek clarification during procurement. The record also suggested that Korte recognized the problem during bidding, which made its later argument still less persuasive.
The takeaways
First, read the package as a whole. The central lesson from Korte is that specifications, legends, schedules, and drawings should not be evaluated in isolation. On design-build and other alternative-delivery projects, teams sometimes focus on the portion of the package most directly tied to their discipline and assume that inconsistencies elsewhere will be sorted out later. That can be a costly instinct. The court’s analysis shows that if one part of the package expressly requires work and another part imperfectly or incompletely depicts it, decision-makers may still conclude that the requirement exists. Engineers reviewing bridging documents should therefore perform scope reviews across document types, not merely within discipline silos.
Second, do not assume that an apparent impossibility erases the requirement. One reason the case is useful for practitioners is that the contractor’s position is intuitively appealing: If there is no existing chilled water system, why should a requirement to extend chilled water piping be taken literally? But procurement law and contract interpretation do not always track with that intuition. An apparently impossible requirement may be evidence of owner error, but it can also indicate incomplete phasing information, an intended future connection, a placeholder for downstream work, or simply an inconsistency that the bidder must resolve before award. For engineering teams, the better practice is to flag impossible or field-inconsistent requirements as high-risk coordination issues, place them on a formal pre-bid question log, and reflect them clearly in estimate assumptions until the owner responds.
Finally, raise patent ambiguities before pricing is final. The duty to inquire remains one of the most important risk-allocation rules in procurement, yet it is often underappreciated during fast-moving proposal periods. Korte is a reminder that a bidder who sees a glaring inconsistency may lose the ability to rely on its own favorable interpretation later. From a practice standpoint, firms should have a disciplined process for identifying patent ambiguities before bids are locked. That process may include multidisciplinary page-turn reviews, documentation of unresolved questions, and management sign-off on any residual estimating assumptions.
Michael C. Loulakis, Esq., FDBIA, M.ASCE, is the president and CEO of Capital Project Strategies LLC in Reston, Virginia.
John M. Neary, Esq., M.ASCE, is co-chair of Akerman’s construction practice and represents owners, developers, contractors, and design professionals in civil litigation matters.
This article first appeared in the July/August 2026 issue of Civil Engineering as “Bridging Documents, Design Gaps, and the Duty to Clarify.”
