There are obvious and well-documented risks associated with contracting on the basis of a letter of intent (LOI).
What is less obvious is that different forms of contract raise particular challenges when it comes to framing LOIs. This was brought home to me recently when I looked at an LOI for works to be let under an NEC3 Engineering and Construction Contract (ECC). It quickly became clear that LOIs need careful handling where the “intended” contract is an NEC contract. Continue reading
Yesterday evening the Society of Construction Law (SCL) hosted Coulson J’s talk, “The perfect adjudicator’s decision”, which was chaired by Paul Darling QC.
Coulson J suggested that he had never seen a perfect decision and, unless Kate Winslet was sitting as an adjudicator, the perfect adjudicator does not exist. Therefore, although entitled, “The perfect adjudicator’s decision”, this talk could just as easily have been called “What does it take to be a ‘perfect’ adjudicator?” or, perhaps, more to the point, “What should the decision include and what shouldn’t be in there?”. Instead, Coulson J opted for his “seven golden rules of adjudication”.
Many people are familiar with the Pink Floyd song, Time, and its opening passage of clocks chiming and alarms ringing. Alarm bells often ring in adjudication as well. Continue reading
So, the Bribery Bill is now the Bribery Act. It’s passed Parliament but is not yet in force. The “old” law is in force until then. So what is going to change?
For me, the new Act poses many more questions than it currently answers. Here are a few of my concerns:
The decision in Pilon v Breyer Group addresses some very interesting issues on adjudication enforcement. It is probably one of the more important decisions to have emerged this year.
Broadly speaking, the judgment clarifies the law on two main issues:
Cast your mind back to 1996. I’m not thinking about football and England hosting the European Championship, but rather when what became the Construction Act 1996 was being debated in Parliament. One of the issues which troubled the House of Lords was the extent to which an adjudicator’s decision would be binding; should it be forever (with limited rights to appeal, like in arbitration), just until practical completion or something in the middle? Continue reading
“A volcano is just a mountain with hiccups.”
We are unsure where this quote originates, but it was probably of little comfort to the thousands of travellers affected by April’s biggest story, the Icelandic volcanic eruption, which dominated the news and even managed to push the general election off the front pages for a few days. Continue reading
If you were asked to carry out works to a small part of a large building on the basis that you had to insure the whole building for its full reinstatement value, at a disproportionate cost to the value of the works, would you take the job?
This is the issue that is currently facing many tenants and their contractors in multi-let buildings, and one which we have come across a number of times recently. Continue reading
A construction or engineering contract, in particular a sub-contract, often allows the contractor to order the sub-contractor to stop work. This often appears as a contractual right to order the sub-contractor to suspend work immediately (or to suspend after a short notice period) following which, if work does not resume within six or twelve months, the sub-contract may also terminate.
While one contract may be different from the next, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has shone a spotlight on one non-construction law aspect of these circumstances, namely what happens if an instruction to stop or suspend work forces the sub-contractor to make its employees redundant. Continue reading
Unless you have been trapped overseas by the volcanic eruption in Iceland for the last week or so, you will have seen the furore that Edwards-Stuart J’s judgment in Yuanda v WW Gear has caused and the column inches that have been written about it.
Last week I discussed the possibility of an end to Tolent clauses, but another aspect of that judgment is also worthy of a mention; the position of multi-party disputes post-Yuanda. Continue reading