The construction industry often relies on contract forms drafted by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). These AIA forms include agreements between owners, designers, consultants, contractors, subcontractors, and construction managers. Some prefer to use the forms in the stock form, but others prefer to modify the language to their benefit. These modifications can be made in Microsoft Word and uploaded into AIA’s current web-based system, ACD5, to create redlines against the standard AIA forms (Checked-Drafts) and final clean versions without the “DRAFT” watermarks. Law firms and clients keep repositories of these modified templates for future projects.

A common issue with modifying documents offline in Microsoft Word and passing the documents back-and-forth between different email and document management systems is that the metadata of the forms becomes corrupted. AIA technical support then must reset the metadata, which takes hours or days. This delay can pose challenges to clients when they are up against a deadline.

AIA is creating a new system, Catina, to replace ACD5 and address some of these issues. Catina intends to improve the ACD5 experience by allowing users to input values, modify language, and share the forms within the web application. Catina aims to reduce the risk of document corruption by keeping the documents within the web application and avoiding editing documents offline or sharing them across email and document management systems. However, there are concerns with how Catina will be used in the real world.

First, most businesses are accustomed to editing Microsoft Word documents offline, and disrupting that workflow would be time-consuming. Fortunately, Catina will maintain the functionality of modifying forms offline and then uploading the modified documents to the web application.

Second, because Catina has different document metadata that intends to reduce the risk of corruption, documents previously generated and modified through ACD5 will not be forward-compatible with Catina. The repositories of historically modified templates generated through ACD5 will be less useful because of the lack of compatibility with the new system. Contract language modified and negotiated five years ago in an ACD5-based document may need to be manually transferred to a new Catina-based document. This may have the unintended consequence of increasing the time required to generate a new agreement until firms and clients generate similar repositories with Catina-based documents. Currently, there is a plan to sunset the ACD5 platform at the end of 2025, and any finalized documents in ACD5 will be automatically moved to Catina-based formats. However, draft documents in ACD5 and, more importantly, contracts kept in local repositories will not be automatically moved into Catina-based formats. Catina’s development team states that they are looking into making ACD5 files forward-compatible with Catina, but no commitment has been made at this time.