John Fletcher expands on the benefits of CAP when dealing with conflicts in the construction industry
- Conflict Avoidance Procedure: a new way of doing business and avoiding disputes.
We’ve had arbitration, adjudication and mediation in the construction and infrastructure sector for decades, and although they all work well, they also have their problems. All three need a clearly defined dispute, which means it has passed
out of the hands of the project delivery team into the hands of the corporate lawyers. We lawyers are good at our job, and protect our clients by stopping any admissions being made and marshalling the facts into the straitjacket of pleadings
and evidence. What this means in practice is that the focus moves from getting the job done on time and on budget, to winning the adjudication, arbitration or court case arising from the dispute.
Our outlook, quite properly, becomes retrospective as we prepare ourselves and our clients for legal processes in which the adjudicator, arbitrator or judge will look at two versions of something that happened in the past, decide which is more
