Practical Law

One decision that court my eye recently is Flexidig Ltd v M&M Contractors (Europe) Ltd, mainly because it contains – as all good adjudication enforcement decisions should do – an interesting collection of attempted challenges to enforcement.

The recent Court of Appeal judgment in Farrar v Rylatt should serve as a warning to practitioners of the uphill struggle that a party faces when attempting to appeal a trial judge’s findings of fact.

Meadowside Building Developments Ltd (in liquidation) v 12-18 Hill Street Management Company Ltd provides another development in the law of adjudication (and adjudication enforcement) that places liquidators (acting on behalf of a company in liquidation) closer to being able to enforce adjudicators’ decisions.

Now that some dust has settled on the Court of Appeal’s decision in Gosvenor v Aygun, it seems appropriate to consider where we are with fraud and stays in the context of adjudication enforcement.

Liquidated damages (LD) clauses are a fixture of construction contracts. As we all know, they are a secondary obligations to pay an agreed sum of money, arising upon breach of a primary obligation of the contract. In the case of a construction contract, this will invariably be in the event of delay: the failure to … Continue reading After Makdessi and GPP, the question is, are your LDs commercially viable? →

A plethora of issues were raised, and disposed of, by Fraser J’s recently handed-down judgment in Riva Properties and others v Foster + Partners Ltd, the most awkwardly entertaining one being the sense of pantomime arising from the court’s clear disapproval of the architect’s behaviour, which was described at various stages as “grubby”, “disingenuous” and “wholly … Continue reading Contributory negligence and construction contracts →

Every time we think the courts might have given defendants in adjudication enforcement proceedings slightly more latitude in raising their dissatisfaction with an adjudicator’s decision, the court brings us back down to earth with a bump and reminds us that, in fact, no matter how hard done by our clients feel, they will have to … Continue reading The more things change, the more they stay the same →

For a number of years it seemed as if the law had gone soft in its old age. It began by telling us that, when construing the terms of a contract, we shouldn’t allow the literal words to mask the true objective intention. As Lord Steyn said (in Sirius International v FAI): “[T]he tyrant Temures … Continue reading It means what it says on the tin: contract interpretation in a post-Arnold v Britton world →