Use case · Load review letters
Draft your load review letters in Fermito.
A sealed one to three page letter on firm letterhead, addressed to the contractor or owner by name, naming the proposed load change, the basis used, the engineering opinion, and the assumptions and limitations the opinion stands on.
Drafts today
The load review letter shape drafts end-to-end today. Firm-specific template polish (cover, header, signature block) lands in 2 to 4 weeks per firm during onboarding. Sketch attachment for marked-up loaded-area plans is on the near-term product roadmap.
The recurring scenario
What this letter solves on the ground.
An email lands at 11:14 AM. The drawings assumed a 40 lb per square foot mechanical load on the penthouse slab. The owner now wants a 1,200 lb rooftop air handler on four point bases inside a 3 by 5 foot footprint. Can the slab take it. By when can the engineer confirm.
The answer needs to land in the contractor's inbox before end of day. Not as drawings, not as a calc package. As a one and a half page sealed letter on firm letterhead, addressed to the contractor by name, stating what was reviewed, what basis was used, what assumptions apply, and what the professional engineer's opinion is. Other days the same shape carries a chiller swap, an MRI delivery route, a safe in a heritage office, a snow load reconciliation, or a vehicle access path that crosses an underground vault.
Fermito drafts the letter from the engineer's voice notes against the proposed change, the structural drawings attached to the visit, and the firm's prior load review letters as the voice reference. The engineer reads, edits the assumptions for accuracy, and seals.
What Fermito drafts
A draft, in your firm's voice, in the structure your reviewers already trust.
Below: the shape of the document Fermito assembles for this use case. Headings, sequence, and limitations bands are encoded against your firm's house template, not a generic schema.
Sealed letter, draft preview
Re: Proposed rooftop air handler, level 12 penthouse slab.
Documents reviewed
Existing structure
Proposed loading
Assessment
Limitations
Where the engineer stays in the loop
Fermito drafts. The engineer decides.
Sealed work belongs to the licensed professional. The list below names what Fermito does not decide for the engineer on this letter type. The engineer reads, edits, and seals.
- The engineering opinion. Fermito drafts the assessment from the engineer's notes; the engineer signs the sentence, not Fermito.
- The basis call. Whether the opinion is by inspection, by calculation, or by reference to the original design is a professional choice the engineer makes; Fermito surfaces what was used.
- The assumption bands. Built per drawings, materials per spec, loads as represented, no post-construction modifications. The engineer confirms each band actually fits this letter.
- The seal. Fermito will not export a sealed Word file without the engineer's explicit attestation. The seal stays with the licensed engineer, every time.
How Fermito drafts it
Four mechanisms, on every draft.
The same four mechanisms apply across every sealed letter Fermito assembles. Each card links to the matching section of the longer How Fermito Thinks read.
Voice-in
The engineer talks through the visit on the phone they already carry. Fermito holds the live transcript on-device and resumes through dropped signal.
How it worksPhoto-anchored
Each photo is captioned by Claude Vision and grounded in the draft. If the text says concrete and the photo shows steel framing, Fermito flags the mismatch.
How it worksFirm-template-aware
Cover, header, footer, distribution, signature block, and the firm's standard phrases are encoded once and reused on every draft. Output reads like the firm wrote it.
How it worksEngineer-attested
Fermito will not export a sealed document without the engineer's explicit confirmation. The seal stays with the licensed engineer, every time.
How it works
Read the primer
Sealed opinion letters: the daily-habit doc category.
Long-form read on the short sealed letters that make up roughly a quarter of a structural firm's output, why their brevity is what makes them defensibility-critical, and what a reviewer looks for in a load review letter specifically.
Try Fermito on a letter you have already issued
Audit a sealed letter you have already issued. You get a peer-reviewer read back: what holds up, what a reviewer would flag, and the questions a careful reviewer would ask before sealing. Independent, no signup, no product pitch inside the read itself.