Use case · Shoring letters
Draft your shoring requirement letters in Fermito.
A sealed shoring requirement letter on firm letterhead, addressed to the contractor by name, naming the element being removed, the shoring being evaluated, the assessment, and the limitations bands. Drafted from the voice notes you took on the call, ready for a 10 minute review instead of a 90 minute retype.
Drafts today
The shoring 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 shoring arrangement plans is on the near-term product roadmap.
The recurring scenario
What this letter solves on the ground.
It is 3:40 PM on a Friday. The general contractor calls. The crew is pulling down an interior partition between two tenant units on Monday morning, the original drawings show a header carrying joists above the wall, and the shoring sub has just emailed a proposed temporary support arrangement. The engineer has ninety minutes to decide whether it is acceptable, issue a sealed letter the sub can give to the crew foreman, and get back to the rest of the day.
The letter has to be on firm letterhead, addressed to the GC by name, reference the project number and the drawing sheet the header appears on. It has to name the element being removed, identify the load path during the work, state that the proposed shoring is acceptable under the engineer's stated assumptions, and close with a limitations paragraph that takes nearly a quarter of its length. Seventy two hours later the partition is out and nobody remembers the letter, but it sits in the project file as the single load-bearing artifact documenting the engineer's professional opinion about a temporary condition that no longer exists.
Fermito drafts the letter from the engineer's voice notes on the call, the contractor's submission attached to the visit, and the firm's prior shoring letters as the voice reference. The engineer reviews, edits, and seals before 5:11 PM.
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 shoring for partition removal, level 2.
Documents reviewed
Existing structure
Proposed work and shoring methodology
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 judgment, every time. Fermito drafts the assessment sentence from the engineer's notes; the engineer signs the sentence, not Fermito.
- The four limitation bands. Built per drawings, no post-construction modifications, loads as represented, contractor's continuing obligation to monitor. The engineer confirms each band fits the work.
- The acceptance versus requirement decision. Whether the letter says the contractor's proposed shoring is acceptable, or whether the engineer requires a specific arrangement, is a professional posture the engineer chooses.
- 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
Inside a shoring requirement letter: the acceptance language.
Long-form read on the five sections, the four assumption bands, and the acceptance versus requirement language that decides what posture the firm's seal stands behind.
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.