Get in the habit of maintaining a daily diary. Really. The day-to-day project communications on tasking and design criteria should all come to you as e-mails, not voice or redline markups. You should download their e-mails every Thursday to PDFs, because you'll be locked out of Outlook the day you're laid off. If superiors give you only verbal directions, transcribe voice instructions to your e-diary, and buy a cheap Pentax scanner to scan all their redlines, then backup those files every day to your thumb drive.
Best is a thumb drive for every project, then after seven years' liability, you can have a little microwave popcorn party and erase that thumb drive for your next project.
Theoretically the department manager is solely responsible for design liability, but s/he's probably "divorced" from their spouse, with the house in their kids' name, and any savings in a off-shore account in Netherland Antilles. And the firm's principals, who knows their E&O-dodge story?
Most Boards now make all discipline engineers who "touched" the work also stamp the drawings, none of them are covered by the company's E&O liability policies as "also named", so they're 'jointly and separably liable" and really E&O just pays for the attorney's fees anyway, after it's all said and done, they even go after your spouse in joint property states now to collect.
I've seen a simple typo error on a junior office engineer's structural design computer input cascade through the entire company, the local building official who also approved the plans, the architect, school district, even contractors and their subs, then when the data error was found, subsequent forensics and as-built reviews uncovered dozens more code errors, disgorging all the project communications revealed hundreds of more compromising cross-liabilities, just the simple error of + instead of - in data input caused some involved companies to cease to exist and careers wrecked, long before the 3 years of court litigation to settle up.
I've seen a simple thumbs up instead of thumbs down crane command error by a junior field engineer cascade throughout the entire contracting company, the subcontractors on up to the engineering designer, even the suppliers, just the simple error of thumbs up instead of thumbs down caused involved companies to cease to exist and supervisory design personnel careers wrecked, even though they had no control over field operations as explicitly written in the specs!
That's where having an e-diary, voice transcripts and scans of redlines and non-digital communications is priceless, although, if you've made the initiating error, however small and even doing what you're told by superiors, you'll never work in engineering again, and if your company goes E&O bankrupt, you're out of work anyway, with a bad rep.
That's why so many design engineers are on meds. % )
Get a thumb drive. Write everything down and archive it.
