Being able to read, understand, and apply the detailed and often lengthy documents used in every construction project is critical to the success of a project and its management team. These details include important information that pertains to the risk that contractors take on every time a contract is signed. Simply skimming over these documents or, worse yet, ignoring them altogether, is very common in the construction industry. After all, managers are under tight deadlines and other constraints that put them under immediate pressure to start the project in haste. While some project managers succeed despite not reading the contract documents thoroughly, it only takes one mistake that could have been avoided by reading the documents to sink a project, a project manager's career, or even an entire company