When a developer or EPC evaluates engineering firms, the comparison usually comes down to three things: the size and experience of the firm, the promised schedule, and the fee. Bigger tends to read as safer. A firm with thousands of engineers on staff looks like it has depth, redundancy, and capacity to spare.
There is a fourth question that almost never gets asked, and it predicts the quality of your drawing set better than any of the other three: which specific person will direct the design of your project, and will that person’s seal be on the sheets?
That is not a trivia question. It has a legal answer, and the answer is frequently not what buyers assume.
What a Professional Engineer’s Seal Actually Certifies
A P.E. seal is not a quality-control checkmark applied at the end of a project. Under the licensure framework that most states model their rules on, a seal certifies that the work was performed by the licensee or under that licensee’s responsible charge — a defined term meaning direct control and personal supervision of the engineering work.
The National Society of Professional Engineers has been explicit about where the line falls. Its Board of Ethical Review has held that the engineer in responsible charge is actively engaged in the engineering process from conception to completion, and that engineering decisions must be made personally by that engineer or by people over whom they exercise supervisory direction and control. Critically, the Board has stated that reviewing drawings after they have been prepared, without involvement in the design and development process, does not meet the definition of responsible charge.
Read that again, because it is the whole point. A senior engineer who is handed a finished set and signs off on it is not, by the profession’s own standard, in responsible charge of that work.
The Law Firm Problem
Anyone who has hired a large law firm already understands this dynamic. You retain the firm because of the name on the door and the partner who sat in the pitch meeting. Then the actual work is done by associates, and the partner’s involvement is a review at the end and a signature.
Large engineering firms are structured the same way, for the same economic reason. A firm with ten thousand engineers did not get there by putting principal-level people on every project. Leverage — assigning most of the production work to junior staff under nominal senior oversight — is how a firm of that size scales. It is not misconduct, and junior engineers are frequently excellent. The difficulty is that the staffing model is invisible from the outside. The proposal does not disclose it, and the gap between who sold the work and who performs it usually does not surface until something goes wrong.
And when it does surface, it rarely looks like an outright error. It looks like judgment. A design can be fully code-compliant on paper and still be awkward to build, expensive to procure, or likely to draw comments in utility review. Recognizing that in advance is not something you learn from a code book. It comes from having personally worked through the same problem on previous projects.
Questions Worth Asking Any Firm You Are Evaluating
These apply to us as much as to anyone else. Ask them of every firm on your shortlist, and compare the answers.
- Who is the engineer of record on my project, by name? Not a title or a department — a person. A firm that cannot name that individual during the proposal stage probably has not assigned one yet.
- Will that engineer direct the design, or review it at the end? Ask it directly, because “reviews the work” and “is in responsible charge of the work” are not the same thing, and the difference is exactly where quality is won or lost.
- How many other projects is that engineer carrying right now? Personal supervision has a practical ceiling. An engineer of record spread across a dozen concurrent projects cannot be deeply engaged in all of them.
- Who seals each sheet? Under the model rules, each sheet is to be sealed by the licensee who was in responsible charge of that sheet. Ask to see a comparable past drawing set and look at whose seals appear on it.
- Is that engineer licensed in my project’s jurisdiction? Licensure is state by state. The engineer sealing the set has to hold a license where the project is being built, which matters most on multi-state portfolios.
- When revisions come back, does the same person handle them? The rules require revisions to be sealed by the licensee in responsible charge of those revisions. If your set is coming back sealed by someone new, the continuity you were promised is not there.
What a Good Answer Sounds Like
You are listening for specificity. A firm that answers with names, current workload, and a straight description of who does what is telling you the truth about its staffing model. A firm that answers with reassurance — depth of bench, robust QA process, decades of combined experience — is answering a question you did not ask.
Neither answer disqualifies a firm on its own. Plenty of projects are served perfectly well by a leveraged team, particularly straightforward ones where the design problems are familiar. But you should know which model you are buying, because the price is often similar and the experience is not.
Where We Sit, and the Trade-Off That Comes With It
We will be direct about our own position, since it is the reason this topic is on our minds.
McCalmont Engineering does not have thousands of engineers. Our projects are designed by senior engineers because senior engineers are who we have. The person directing your design is the person whose seal goes on the set, and the person who picks up the phone when there is a question from the field.
A firm our size makes different commitments about volume than a firm ten times larger does, and there are projects where a different structure is the better fit. What we can say is that the engineer you talk to during the proposal is the engineer who does the work — and that is a claim you should make every firm you are considering put in writing.
The Bottom Line
A stamped drawing set is not a commodity, even though it is usually priced like one. Two sets can carry the same scope, the same fee, and the same delivery date, and be the product of completely different amounts of experience.
The seal on the drawing sheet is the one place where that difference is documented. It is worth asking whose it will be before you sign, rather than finding out during construction.
Sources
- National Society of Professional Engineers, Board of Ethical Review — Responsible Charge and Sealing Drawings, including the finding that after-the-fact review without design involvement does not satisfy responsible charge.
- NCEES — Model Rules, requirements for seals and signatures, including sheet-by-sheet sealing by the licensee in responsible charge and the treatment of revisions.