A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the judgment in Niken v Trigram and highlighted some of the issues that arise in serial adjudication. Just as I went to press (so to speak), the issue popped up again, this time in Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd v Merit Merrell Technology Ltd. It is a long-running dispute that I’ve looked at before, although then I was discussing the parties’ contract drafting and the question mark over which ANB and which adjudication rules applied to the parties’ disputes.
While in Niken v Trigram it was very apparent that the same dispute had not been referred to more than one adjudicator, in ICI v Merit, the point was not so clear cut (at least, not the way ICI argued it). Perhaps this time, it was less shades of grey and more a whiter shade of pale. Continue reading
