By the Templateez Team · Licensed Attorney · June 2026

Intake Forms for Architecture and Engineering Firms: Project Scope, Code Compliance, and Professional Liability

A structural engineering firm in central New Jersey took on what looked like a routine tenant improvement project — converting 6,000 square feet of office space into a medical clinic for a dermatology practice. The scope seemed clear enough. The client wanted exam rooms, a procedure room, a waiting area, and a reception desk. The engineer priced it as a standard commercial interior fit-out and quoted a lump-sum design fee.

Three weeks into schematic design, the problems started surfacing. The building was in a flood zone, which triggered FEMA elevation certificate requirements the firm had not accounted for. The municipality had adopted the 2021 IBC with local amendments requiring additional ventilation for medical-use occupancies. The client assumed LEED Silver certification was part of the scope because it had been mentioned in a phone call but never documented. And the landlord’s lease required the tenant’s design consultants to carry $2 million in professional liability coverage — the firm carried $1 million.

Every one of those issues could have been identified at intake, before a single line was drawn. Instead, the firm spent four weeks and roughly $18,000 in unbillable time redesigning, re-pricing, and renegotiating. The client relationship never fully recovered.

Architecture and engineering intake is not administrative overhead. It is the process that defines the scope that drives everything else — fees, timelines, regulatory compliance, and the standard of care against which the firm will be measured if something goes wrong. Get intake right and the project has a foundation. Get it wrong and you are building on sand.

Why A/E Intake Is Fundamentally Different

Most professional services firms collect client information, define the engagement, and start working. Architecture and engineering firms do all of that, but they also take on a regulatory obligation that most other professions never touch. When an architect stamps a set of drawings, that stamp is a legal representation that the design complies with applicable building codes, zoning requirements, accessibility standards, and life-safety regulations. When a structural engineer seals a calculation package, that seal carries personal professional liability.

This means A/E intake is not just about understanding what the client wants. It is about understanding the regulatory environment the project sits inside, the physical conditions the design must respond to, the other consultants whose work will intersect with yours, and the contractual framework that defines your exposure. Miss any of those dimensions and you are designing in the dark.

The firms that treat intake as a quick client-information form — name, address, project description, budget — are the firms that end up issuing change orders for scope they should have included, redesigning for code requirements they should have identified, and defending professional liability claims for standards of care they never explicitly defined. For any professional services firm operating in a regulated industry, the intake form is not a formality. It is the document that establishes what you knew, what you committed to, and what was outside your scope.

Project Identification: Classifying the Work Before You Price It

The single most important function of an A/E intake form is project classification. The type of project determines which codes apply, which consultants are needed, which permits are required, how long the design will take, and how much it should cost. If you classify the project incorrectly at intake, every downstream decision is built on a flawed assumption.

Your intake form needs to capture:

• Project type — new construction, renovation, addition, tenant improvement, change of use, or adaptive reuse. Each carries different code implications. A change of use from office to restaurant, for instance, triggers occupancy reclassification, which can require structural upgrades, new fire suppression systems, and additional egress.
• Building use and occupancy classification — Assembly, Business, Educational, Factory, High Hazard, Institutional, Mercantile, Residential, Storage, or Utility. Under the IBC, occupancy type drives fire-resistance ratings, allowable building area, sprinkler requirements, and egress calculations. Getting this wrong is not a paperwork error — it is a life-safety issue.
• Gross square footage — both existing (for renovations) and proposed (for new construction or additions). Square footage determines construction type thresholds, code-required fire suppression, and fee calculations for firms that price by the square foot.
• Number of stories and building height — these interact with construction type and occupancy to determine allowable building area under IBC Chapter 5. A four-story building in Type V-B construction is not code-compliant. Your intake needs to flag that before design starts.
• Site location, municipality, and zoning classification — the jurisdiction determines which code edition applies, and the zoning classification determines height limits, setbacks, lot coverage, parking requirements, and use restrictions.

Firms that skip this classification step at intake inevitably discover the project is more complex than they assumed — after they have already quoted a fee based on the simpler version. That is how you end up doing $50,000 worth of work on a $30,000 contract.

Client and Stakeholder Mapping: Who Has Authority, Who Has Requirements

Architecture and engineering projects rarely involve just two parties. A typical commercial project might have a property owner, a developer, a tenant, a general contractor, a construction manager, a lender, and three or four design subconsultants — each with their own requirements, their own approval authority, and their own expectations about what the design team is delivering.

Your intake form should map the full stakeholder landscape:

• Property owner — the legal owner of the real property. On tenant improvement projects, this is not the client. The owner may have approval rights over exterior changes, structural modifications, or signage.
• Client / contracting entity — the party who is actually hiring and paying your firm. This may be the owner, the developer, the tenant, or a construction manager acting as owner’s representative.
• General contractor or construction manager — if already selected, their identity affects constructability reviews, value engineering, and construction administration scope.
• Other design consultants — MEP engineer, structural engineer, civil engineer, landscape architect, interior designer, lighting consultant, acoustic consultant. Who is already on board? Who does the client expect your firm to subconsult? Who is being hired directly by the owner?
• Lender — if the project is financed, the lender may have requirements for design documentation, progress reporting, or third-party reviews.
• End user — if different from the owner or client. A developer building a medical office building for a hospital system has a very different end-user dynamic than a homeowner building their own house.

Mapping stakeholders at intake prevents one of the most common A/E project failures: designing for the wrong audience. When you do not know who the decision-makers are, you present designs to people who cannot approve them, incorporate feedback from people who do not have authority, and miss requirements from parties whose needs were never communicated. The stakeholder map is also critical for qualifying high-ticket engagements — a project with six approval layers is fundamentally different from one with a single decision-maker, and your fee should reflect that.

Budget and Fee Structure: Setting Expectations Before Design Starts

In architecture and engineering, the construction budget is not just a number the client gives you. It is a design parameter. A $200-per-square-foot budget produces a very different building than a $400-per-square-foot budget. Steel structure versus wood frame. Curtain wall versus stucco. Custom millwork versus catalog fixtures. If you do not capture the budget at intake, you risk designing a building the client cannot afford to build.

Your intake form should document:

• Construction budget — total anticipated construction cost, ideally broken down by hard costs and soft costs. If the client does not have a budget, that itself is critical information — it means the project may need a feasibility study before design begins.
• Design fee structure — percentage of construction cost, fixed fee, hourly with a not-to-exceed cap, or phased billing. Document it at intake so there is no ambiguity about how the firm will be compensated.
• Project schedule — design start, permit submission target, construction start, and occupancy deadline. If the client needs to occupy the building by a specific date (a lease expiration, a school semester start, a hospital accreditation deadline), that drives everything backward.
• Permitting timeline — in some jurisdictions, permit review takes two weeks. In others, it takes four months. If the client’s schedule does not account for permitting, you need to flag that at intake, not after you submit drawings and the building department tells you they will get to it in 90 days.

Documenting budget and timeline at intake also protects the firm against scope creep. When the client asks for a feature that exceeds the documented budget, the intake form provides the reference point: “The construction budget documented at intake was $1.2 million. The requested addition of a green roof system adds approximately $180,000, which exceeds the stated budget. Proceed?” Without that documented baseline, the conversation becomes adversarial instead of collaborative.

Code and Regulatory Landscape: The Compliance Map

An architecture or engineering firm’s professional obligation begins with identifying the applicable regulatory framework. This is not something you figure out as you go. It is something you document at intake so that every design decision traces back to a known set of requirements.

Your intake form should capture:

• Applicable building code edition — IBC 2018, 2021, or 2024, plus state and local amendments. The edition determines structural loads, energy requirements, fire-resistance ratings, and accessibility standards. This is exactly the kind of code-version issue that catches firms off guard, as we discussed in our guide on construction permitting and code compliance.
• Zoning requirements — height limits, setbacks, lot coverage, floor area ratio (FAR), parking ratios, and use restrictions. A project that exceeds the FAR needs a variance, which adds months to the timeline.
• Historic preservation — is the building or the district designated as historic? This triggers review by a preservation commission, limits exterior modifications, and may require specific materials and construction methods.
• ADA and accessibility — all commercial projects must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Renovations that exceed certain cost thresholds trigger accessibility upgrades to the entire facility, not just the renovated area.
• Environmental regulations — wetland buffers, flood zone designations (FEMA zones A, V, X), brownfield remediation requirements, stormwater management, and tree-preservation ordinances.
• HOA or design review board — in planned communities, a design review board may have authority over exterior materials, colors, landscaping, and signage. Their requirements are in addition to the building code, not instead of it.

Documenting the regulatory landscape at intake serves two purposes. First, it ensures the design team knows what they are designing to before they start drawing. Second, it creates a record that the firm identified and addressed the applicable requirements — which becomes critical if a compliance issue surfaces later. If a building department rejects your plans because you missed a local amendment, the question is not just whether you fix it. The question is whether your intake process was adequate to identify it in the first place.

Existing Conditions: What You Are Working With

For renovation, addition, and adaptive reuse projects, understanding existing conditions is as important as understanding the client’s goals. You cannot design an addition without knowing what the existing structure can support. You cannot plan a mechanical system without knowing what utilities are available and what condition the existing systems are in.

Your intake form should capture:

• Existing drawings — are original architectural, structural, and MEP drawings available? If so, how current are they? Drawings from 1975 may not reflect 40 years of modifications.
• Previous surveys — has the property been surveyed recently? Is there an ALTA/NSPS survey, a boundary survey, or a topographic survey on file?
• Known structural issues — settlement cracks, water intrusion, foundation problems, previous structural modifications (load-bearing walls removed without engineering).
• Hazardous materials — for buildings constructed before 1980, asbestos in floor tiles, pipe insulation, and ceiling materials is common. Lead paint is present in pre-1978 structures. Mold may be present in buildings with water intrusion history. These conditions affect construction methods, timelines, and costs.
• MEP system age and condition — how old are the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical systems? Are they adequate for the proposed use or will they need replacement? An existing 200-amp electrical service may not support a dental office with digital imaging equipment.

Existing conditions documentation at intake prevents one of the most expensive surprises in A/E practice: discovering mid-design that the existing building cannot support what the client wants without major structural or systems upgrades that were not in the budget.

Scope of Services: What Is In, What Is Out

Professional liability claims against architects and engineers almost always involve a dispute about scope. The client expected something the firm did not deliver. The firm assumed something was excluded that the client assumed was included. The path to avoiding these disputes runs directly through the intake form.

Your intake form should explicitly document:

• Which design phases are included — schematic design, design development, construction documents, bidding and negotiation, construction administration. Each phase is a distinct scope with distinct deliverables. A client who hires you for “construction documents” is not hiring you for construction administration unless it is explicitly included.
• What is explicitly excluded — geotechnical investigation, environmental assessment, hazardous materials abatement design, furniture procurement, signage design, landscape architecture. If your firm does not provide it, document that at intake.
• Additional services authorization — how will changes to scope be authorized and billed? Document the process up front so that when the client asks for something outside the original scope, there is a clear mechanism for adding it.

The scope section of the intake form is the seed of the professional services agreement. Everything documented here gets formalized in the contract. Everything missed here becomes a gray area that breeds disputes. For firms that want to understand how intake documentation sets client expectations and prevents misunderstandings, the scope section is where that principle applies most directly.

Engineering-Specific Intake: Structural, MEP, and Civil

Engineering firms — whether operating independently or as subconsultants to an architect — have discipline-specific intake requirements that go beyond the general project information captured above.

Structural engineering intake should capture:

• Soil conditions and whether a geotechnical report exists or needs to be commissioned
• Seismic design category (determined by location and soil class)
• Wind exposure category and design wind speed
• Snow load requirements (ground snow load varies significantly by geography and elevation)
• Special loading requirements (heavy equipment, file storage, assembly occupancy, rooftop mechanical units)

MEP engineering intake should capture:

• Available utilities — electrical service capacity, gas availability, water pressure, sewer vs. septic
• Applicable energy code — IECC edition plus state amendments (some states, like California with Title 24, have their own energy code entirely)
• Sustainability targets — LEED, WELL, Passive House, Energy Star, net-zero. Each certification program imposes specific requirements on MEP design that must be identified at intake, not discovered mid-design.
• Special systems — medical gas, laboratory exhaust, data center cooling, commercial kitchen ventilation. These drive mechanical design in ways that standard HVAC does not.

Civil engineering intake should capture:

• Site survey availability and currency
• Topographic conditions and grading requirements
• Stormwater management requirements — many jurisdictions now require post-development stormwater runoff to match or reduce pre-development levels
• Utility connections — locations of water mains, sanitary sewers, storm sewers, gas lines, and electrical feeds, plus available capacity
• Erosion and sediment control requirements during construction

Engineering-specific intake fields are not optional extras. They determine whether the project is feasible at the proposed budget and timeline. A structural engineer who does not ask about soil conditions at intake may design a spread-footing foundation for a site that requires deep piles — a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars on a commercial project.

Professional Liability: Defining the Standard of Care at Intake

Professional liability is the backdrop against which every A/E intake form operates. When a claim is filed against an architecture or engineering firm, the central question is whether the firm met the applicable standard of care — the level of skill and diligence that a reasonably competent professional would exercise under similar circumstances.

Your intake form should address:

• Standard of care definition — does the contract define the standard as “reasonable care and skill” (appropriate) or does it include language like “highest standard” or “free from defects” (dangerous and potentially uninsurable)?
• Limitation of liability — many A/E contracts limit the firm’s total liability to the amount of the design fee, or to the amount of the firm’s professional liability insurance. Document whether the client has agreed to or will negotiate a limitation.
• Indemnification — mutual indemnification (each party indemnifies the other for their own negligence) is standard. Broad-form indemnification (the firm indemnifies the client for everything, including the client’s own negligence) is a professional liability insurance exclusion in many policies.
• Insurance requirements — the firm’s professional liability (E&O) coverage limits and the client’s builder’s risk insurance. Some clients require the design firm to maintain coverage for a specific period after project completion.

Documenting these items at intake — before the contract is negotiated — surfaces deal-breakers early. If a client’s standard contract includes an uninsurable indemnification clause, you want to know that at intake, not after you have invested weeks in schematic design. The relationship between missing intake fields and downstream liability exposure is one we explore in depth in our guide on the liability gap created by missing intake fields, and nowhere is that gap more consequential than in professional design services.

Sustainability and Certification Goals: Intake Implications

A client who mentions “we want a green building” in a phone call has communicated almost nothing actionable. Green building certifications are specific programs with specific requirements, and each one imposes distinct constraints on the design process that must be identified at intake.

• LEED — which level (Certified, Silver, Gold, Platinum)? Which rating system (BD+C, ID+C, O+M)? LEED certification requires documentation from day one of design, including energy modeling, materials tracking, and commissioning plans.
• WELL Building Standard — focuses on occupant health through air quality, water quality, lighting, thermal comfort, and acoustics. WELL requirements affect MEP design and interior finishes.
• Passive House — extremely stringent airtightness and thermal performance requirements that fundamentally change the building envelope design.
• Energy Star — for commercial buildings, requires energy performance in the top 25% of similar buildings nationwide.
• Net-zero energy — requires on-site renewable energy generation equal to annual energy consumption. This affects roof design (solar panels), building orientation, and MEP system selection.

Each certification program adds cost to both design and construction. If the client wants LEED Gold, the design fee needs to account for the additional documentation, energy modeling, and commissioning coordination. If that goal is not captured at intake, the firm either absorbs the additional effort or has a difficult conversation about additional fees after the contract is signed. Neither outcome is good.

The Multi-Consultant Coordination Question

Most significant architecture and engineering projects involve multiple design firms. The architect might subconsult the structural engineer, the MEP engineer, and the civil engineer. Or the owner might hire each consultant directly. This distinction matters enormously for coordination, liability, and insurance.

Your intake form should document:

• Who is the prime consultant — the firm that holds the contract with the owner and coordinates the work of all other design disciplines.
• Subconsultant scopes — what is each subconsultant responsible for, and what are the boundaries between their scopes? The gap between the structural engineer’s scope and the architect’s scope is where coordination failures live.
• Insurance coverage — who carries professional liability insurance for which scope? If the architect subconsults the structural engineer, the architect’s policy may or may not cover the structural engineer’s work. This needs to be documented, not assumed.
• Coordination responsibilities — who is responsible for clash detection between disciplines? Who coordinates the permit submission? Who attends construction meetings?

Multi-consultant coordination failures are one of the leading causes of construction defect claims. A mechanical duct that conflicts with a structural beam. A plumbing riser that runs through a fire-rated wall without proper firestopping. An electrical panel that is located where the architect designed a window. These are coordination issues, and they trace back to intake — to the moment when someone should have documented who is responsible for what and how the design disciplines would communicate.

Putting It All Together: The A/E Intake Workflow

Architecture and engineering intake is dense. But it follows a logical sequence that mirrors the project itself:

1. Client and stakeholder identification — who is the client, who are the decision-makers, who else is involved
2. Project classification — type, occupancy, size, location, zoning
3. Budget and timeline — construction budget, design fee structure, schedule milestones, permitting timeline
4. Code and regulatory mapping — applicable codes, zoning, historic preservation, ADA, environmental constraints
5. Existing conditions — for renovation and addition projects: existing drawings, surveys, structural issues, hazardous materials, MEP system condition
6. Scope of services — which phases are included, what is excluded, how additional services are authorized
7. Engineering-specific parameters — structural loads, utility availability, energy code, sustainability targets, special systems
8. Professional liability — standard of care, limitation of liability, indemnification, insurance requirements
9. Sustainability and certification goals — specific programs, target levels, documentation requirements
10. Multi-consultant coordination — prime consultant, subconsultant scopes, insurance, coordination responsibilities

Each section informs the next. The project classification determines the applicable codes. The codes determine the engineering parameters. The engineering parameters determine the budget feasibility. The budget feasibility determines the scope of services. And the scope of services determines the professional liability exposure. It is a chain, and intake is the first link.

The firms that invest in thorough intake — that capture all of this before a single line is drawn — are the firms that deliver projects on budget, on schedule, and without professional liability claims. The firms that treat intake as an afterthought are the ones spending unbillable hours redesigning, renegotiating, and defending.

The intake form is not the least interesting part of an architecture or engineering project. It is the part that makes everything else possible.