Construction
Contentious construction work involves the resolution of disputes, principally through arbitration, litigation, or mediation. In addition, the construction world has some distinctive dispute processes of its own including adjudication and dispute boards. Non-contentious construction work involves strategic advice on how to structure the parties’ roles and risks in the project, procurement processes by which parties bid to win contracts, drafting and negotiating those contracts and advising on related matters including financing, insurance, health and safety, environmental matters and insolvency. Clients range from developers, project owners, insurers, contractors, architects, engineers, industry associations, public authorities and government bodies to major companies and partnerships. A good piece of advice for those hoping to embark on any training contract is to be open minded about the seats you undertake and the area in which you ultimately qualify. Angus Rankin was right at the end of his training when he set his sights on a career in construction and engineering disputes. “My fourth and last seat was in construction, during which I worked on a case involving an incident aboard a deep-water drilling ship off the coast of West Africa – I knew then that this was what I wanted to do,” he recalls. “As well as doing a lot of pre-electronic disclosure, I enjoyed working closely with both technical and quantum experts. That case and the excellent mentoring I received from the associate, senior associate and partner in that team were big influences on me.” Following a secondment to the legal department of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) in Tokyo, then several years in an MHI subsidiary’s London office (latterly as general counsel and company secretary), Angus returned to Hogan Lovells as a partner in 2017, re-joining the construction and engineering disputes team where he had completed his training a decade before.
Today he acts on disputes arising from large- scale infrastructure projects, principally in the power sector, all over the world. The construction disputes team at Hogan Lovells spans a range of other sectors, particularly offshore wind, rail and airports. International flavour There is a strong international flavour to the team’s work, meaning that Angus and his colleagues represent their clients in a range of forums: “At any one time, one of our partners might have several procurement challenges pending in the High Court, another might be in a mediation, another about to launch an adjudication, or – increasingly – giving the client an ‘early case assessment’ when signs of trouble first start to appear on the project. However, given the large scale and cross-border nature of the work we do, more often than not international arbitration is the parties’ preferred method for resolving disputes that don’t settle.” As for the underlying causes of the disputes themselves, cases can usually be traced to three key areas of contention. “Although we work for all sorts of clients on all sorts of projects in many different countries, all the disputes we work on tend to boil down to a difference over quality, time and/or money,” he explains. “The types of problem you might encounter when having work done on a house are the same ones on mega-projects, albeit scaled-up in terms of value and the complexity of the facts. But at their simplest, the parties’ complaints can be reduced to, for example, whose fault is it that the works are not finished by the agreed date; the quality of the works is considered to be sub-standard; the contractor wants to be paid extra for something its customer considers to be already included within the initial agreed price, and so on.” Project management A common characteristic of most construction disputes is that they tend to be technical and
For more firms that work in this practice area, please use the “Training contract regional indexes” starting on p205.
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