Practical Law

As an adjudicator, you face a number of hurdles when you go about your daily business of being an adjudicator.

It starts before you even begin work, when you are first approached to be appointed to adjudicate on a matter, and continues throughout the dispute, right up to the crescendo of your involvement, when you hand down your decision.

As long as I have been involved in the process, parties have been coming up with ways of putting more and more hurdles in our way. The one thing that I always tell myself (and anyone else willing to listen to me, like my students) is that it is really important not to give a judge an excuse not to enforce your decision. One could extend that mantra, and say that it is really important that you don’t trip yourself up at any point along the way first. Continue reading →

I’ve been sent a judgment from earlier this year: Maurice J Bushell & Co v Graham Irving Born. It is all about whether, following an arbitration, the court should allow an appeal on a point of law under section 69 of the Arbitration Act 1996 and, if so, should the matter be remitted back to the arbitrator (the tribunal). As someone who sometimes sits as an arbitrator (as well as in other dispute resolver capacities), I found it an interesting judgment.

Those keen-eyed among you will know that it isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about arbitration in the past couple of years, including on the increasing use of arbitration domestically. That’s certainly been born out from my experience this year, having already completed three arbitration awards (which is three more than I completed in the whole of 2016!). Continue reading →

It isn’t every day that we get to refer to Will Smith’s “wicky wicky wild wild wild west“, on this blog, but Jonathan managed it last year when he discussed Fraser J’s judgment in Beumer Group UK Ltd v Vinci Construction UK Ltd.

The parties have been before the court again, this time before O’Farrell J, on a Part 8 declaratory relief application. There is no mention of the wild west this time around. It was all about whether the adjudicator had correctly interpreted the parties’ sub-contract. Not a subject for cowboys! Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, I looked at what Coulson J had to say about experts in Bank of Ireland v Watts. This time, I’m turning my attention to Fraser J’s judgment in Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd (ICI) v Merit Merrell Technology Ltd (MMT).

You may recall that Matt has already looked at some of the payment issues that came out of this judgment and I’m looking at the expert evidence, which was called by the parties to deal with the alleged defects in MMT’s works.
Continue reading →