Practical Law

After over a year of waiting, the Supreme Court finally handed-down judgment in Halliburton Company v Chubb Bermuda Insurance Ltd on 27 November 2020.

I wrote about the Court of Appeal’s judgment back in May 2018, and had forgotten that we were still awaiting the Supreme Court’s judgment until I saw various excited posts on LinkedIn. In the hours and days following the judgment there were posts of a different variety, namely legal updates on the judgment.

One of the advantages of waiting a couple of weeks before writing this blog is that I can read those posts and the thoughts of their esteemed authors, and overall my impression is that there is some disappointment among the international arbitration community that the Supreme Court has not gone far enough.

I want to talk briefly about some of the key issues, before going on to consider whether the case has any implications for UK adjudication. Continue reading →

It is eight months since I first blogged about the impact that COVID-19 was having on dispute resolution in England in a piece aptly called, Adjudicating in the shadow of coronavirus. (I don’t know why, but that title always makes me think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, Love in the time of cholera. I’ve no idea why, other than the lyrical way the title sounds. Certainly, the stories are worlds apart… but I digress…)

That blog was written at the start of the first national lockdown and I followed it a few weeks later with a piece about the lessons I’d learnt in those first few weeks. By the time Jonathan came to write his October post, A few lessons I have learned from resolving disputes during the pandemic, I’d say we had become “old hands” at this on-line stuff.

But has it been plain sailing and how is mediation faring in this on-line world? Continue reading →

The past couple of months have been somewhat lean for TCC judgments on adjudication and arbitration matters, so when our (brilliant!) editor at Thomson Reuters asked me what I wanted to write about this week the answer was not immediately obvious to me. There’s certainly been a lot on the news over the past week and, for once in 2020, there has been some good news. However, you’ve all got plenty of apps and networks giving you your news fix, so I won’t dwell on that. I had pondered discussing my top five movies of the 1980’s, but suspect I won’t get asked to write another construction blog if I do that.

I therefore glanced through the last 12 years of blogs that Matt and I have written, and noticed one of Matt’s from May 2010 when he covered what Coulson J (as he was then) had said at a Society of Construction Law meeting earlier that month about the seven golden rules for adjudicators. The question struck me as to whether those rules have stood the test of time (they have), and they seem particularly relevant at the moment as a number of nominating bodies have been recruiting new adjudicators to their panels over the past couple of years, including RICS. Continue reading →

Last time, Jonathan talked about some of the lessons he’s learned while resolving disputes remotely. I thought I’d follow that with a few thoughts on the remote training that I’ve been doing this year (for obvious reasons) on the topic of expert determination.

Continue reading →