Many years ago, I worked in an A/E firm marketing and public relations department that pursued clients and work on its own, in addition to the work we did for our parent company. On one of our direct client projects, we had an interesting situation occur.
We were retained by a land developer putting together a single-family residential community. Our approved scope of work was to present five alternate names for his project based on the renderings of the model homes he would be offering.
Once a name was selected, we were to draft three alternative logos for that name, refine and produce a final logo for the selected alternative, produce logo slicks and color separations that could be used in printing, develop a list of potential names for the streets in the project, develop a brochure for the community, design a presentation envelope for the brochure and other hand-outs, and design the letterhead, second sheets, and mailing envelopes and labels.
When all this was finished and all products had been delivered, we sent the client a final invoice and thought we were done.
Two weeks later, the client called to ask when he could expect to have his letterhead, second sheets, labels and envelopes. Apparently, he expected that the printing of the first batch of stationery would be part of the design scope. We had never mentioned printing in our proposal scope and he had never told us of his expectation.
However, considering the fee we had achieved on the rest of the project scope, we went ahead with the printing job and satisfied the client.
A few weeks later, our department had a session with the firm VP tasked with looking at all contracts before they were signed. He told us that the majority of lawsuits in the A/E industry had nothing to do with the quality of the work or specific performance based on the contract. Almost two-thirds of industry lawsuits, he told us, had to do with unfulfilled expectations, and the great majority of those suits involved instances where the unfulfilled expectations were about items that were assumed rather than spelled out in detail or even discussed in general.
So he gave us a piece of advice: in addition to our proposals being specific about what we would do, we should also be as specific as possible about what we would not do as part of that project scope.
I was smart enough to know that I didn't want to present a list of things our group would not do. So, on the next proposal, I created a list of services that might be assumed as part of the detailed written scope, and presented it as a list of related services that could be provided for an additional negotiated fee.
This told the client that such services were not currently included in the scope, but were available from us should he/she so desire.
I made it a habit to present such a list as the final section of the proposed scope of work in every proposal for that point on.
This was a great "lessons learned" for me. In fact, I still do this on A/E proposals as well. I ask A/E clients what they think might be assumed by the owner so we can present such items as an "additional services for additional fee" listing in proposals.