What are the Schiff-Hardin lectures, why should you listen to them and where can you find them?

First things first. Here's a link to the latest Michael Hanahan lectures, formerly known as the Schiff-Hardin lectures. Scroll down to the Professional Practice II rollout to view the lecture slides and listen to the recordings.

Schiff Hardin Lectures Background

The first thing to know about the Schiff Hardin Lectures is that they're not really called that anymore.

The lectures were/are recordings from the Professional Practice course from the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The course is/was taught by Michael Hanahan, a construction law attorney at the Chicago firm Schiff-Hardin. The course lectures, both audio and slides, were posted on the Schiff-Hardin website. Almost all the topics covered in the lecture are concepts you will need to know for Practice Management (PcM) and Project Management (PjM). Not only are they incredibly informative, they're also free, so they quickly became highly used resources for these two exams.

In 2020 Mr. Hanahan left Schiff-Hardin for a position at Perkins Coie. You can see the link above went to the lectures, now posted on the Perkins Coie website. That name hasn't quite caught on though, so the lectures are often still referred to as the Schiff-Hardin lectures, even though they no longer exist on that site.

Hanahan Lectures List of Topics

The course outline seemed to change slightly from year to year, even though the same general topics were covered. The most current course that's available has the following lectures:

1. Introduction, Legal Foundation, Dispute Resolution
2. Contract Law and Contract Formation, Interpretation of Contracts
3. Breach of Contracts and Remedies, Construction and Design Professional Insurance
4. Tort Law and Standard of Care
5. Licensing of Architects, Forms of Association
6. AIA – B101 Standard Form of Agreement Between Owner and Architect – Part 1
7. AIA – B101 Standard Form of Agreement Between Owner and Architect – Part 2
8. The Economics of Construction
9. The AIA – A201 General Conditions of the Contract for Construction – Part 1
10. The AIA – A201 General Conditions of the Contract for Construction – Part 2
11. Contracting Methods – Alternative Project Delivery Methods
12. Office Management and Fee Calculation, Copyright of Drawings

All these lessons are valuable, though lectures 6,7 and 9, 10, the ones about the AIA B101 and AIA A201 are probably the most valuable. I reference those lectures and a few others in my PCM/PJM Study Assignments course. As for the actual AIA contracts, you can find links to them on this site over on my page of free ARE 5.0 study material.

Other PCM and PJM Topics

If you're studying for Practice Management or Project Management you might be interested in two other posts on this site:

How to Calculate Overhead Rate and Break Even Rate and Utilization Rate. Both of those (actually all three) are key financial terms you'll need to know for the pro-practice ARE 5.0 exams, in addition to all the contract stuff covered in the Hanahan lecture series.