Many years ago (longer than I care to admit) I went on my first foreign business trip. I had done a small piece of work for a UK subsidiary of a European company. I didn’t know them very well, but was pleasantly surprised when their holding company asked me to go to a meeting in their head office, to discuss a new matter. Their head office was not exactly in the Black Forest, but was pretty close.
Everyone knows that without a construction contract you can’t have a statutory adjudication. Everyone also knows that, absent a contractual adjudication agreement, if there isn’t a construction contract, the adjudicator doesn’t have jurisdiction and so, if he goes ahead and reaches a decision that one party refuses to honour, the court will not enforce it. Continue reading
What happens if your design and build contractor goes bust, but hasn’t paid its professional consultants? In particular, what happens if those consultants then contact you to claim that you can’t use their designs and documents, because you don’t have a valid copyright licence to do so?
This situation may be particularly painful if, before the main contractor became insolvent, you had paid it in full (and it should have paid the consultants, as its sub-contractors). Continue reading
As I was recently sailing beneath a deep blue sky on a junk in the majestic Hong Kong Harbour, gin and tonic in hand, you may be surprised that I had the law on my mind – specifically, Azimut-Benetti v Healey. A dispute between the parties required the High Court to revisit the classic dichotomy between liquidated damages (LDs) and penalties. The fact that the case involved a contract to buy a rather expensive yacht may make this picture a little more understandable!
A client recently raised this question in the context of a project using the NEC3 ECC. It throws up a number of issues including whether the bank holiday:
To the surprise of the man on the street, relatively low value disputes are difficult to litigate cost effectively. Often the value of the claim is soon exceeded by each party’s legal costs. At the end, when one side comes second, it is presented with a very large bill. Mediation offers the parties a way to avoid this. Continue reading
“This gun for hire” was a 1940’s film-noir starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. It was about a hit man and an entertainer, good cops and bad guys, and revenge. Hardly a film that would immediately make you think about 21st century adjudication, or allow you to draw parallels with the process. However, I think you’d be wrong. Continue reading
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses:
“In winter I get up at night and dress by candle-light. In summer, quite the other way – I have to go to bed by day.”
January nights are some of the longest of the year, its days some of the coldest. It’s a time of year when people look forward to the distant summer and warmer months. We’ve been doing the same, identifying the events to look out for in 2011. Of all of these events, the changes to the Construction Act 1996 may have the greatest impact on construction practitioners. The Bribery Act Act 2010 is also due to come into force this year. Corruption and bribery have already been in the news; it is unlikely to stop there.
Can it really be true? Can there really be settled law in the vexed area of the tortious liability of building contractors?
Ever since the House of Lords’ decision in Murphy v Brentwood in 1991 there has been much debate, case law and ink spilt on this question. Cases in the TCC go one way and then the other, and case law in other areas is regularly brought into play by analogy to justify one or other of the opposing views. Continue reading
How a party finances litigation is usually a matter between it and its solicitor. It may simply agree to pay the costs incurred by its solicitor and the legal team, in the usual way, or it may enter into some form of conditional fee agreement (CFA) that affects the level of those fees, depending on the outcome of the litigation. Nowadays, a party may also consider after the event insurance (ATE insurance). Continue reading