Legal Concerns and Risks Facing Project Managers: Small Macao versus Some Major Jurisdictions

Abstract

From the viewpoint of a project management practitioner instead of a traditional comparative law researcher, this article attempts to analyze the legal concerns and risks facing project managers and project management in general and compare these legal concerns and risks between the small jurisdiction Macao and such major jurisdictions as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Hong Kong. Without being specific to any particular industry, these legal concerns and risks are identified and subsumed under three general perspectives, namely, contract disputes, liability for defects and delays, and labor and employment issues. Drawing on academic literature, statutes, acts, and court cases of relevance, this article dwells on these three perspectives as they matter to project management in general, cites the related key legal statutes and acts in these three perspectives in respect of project management, illuminates the statues’ and acts’ essence, and compares them across the aforementioned jurisdictions. Some salient findings are that Macao, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Hong Kong all appear to resemble each other in the legal regulation of the three aforesaid perspectives such that project management and project manager seem to be prone to rather similar legal concerns and risks across all these jurisdictions. However, in fact, it is more challenging in Macao for project managers to evaluate and manage legal concerns and risks than in the other jurisdictions above because of two reasons. First, Macao’s legal framework is so distinct and unique that project managers are not able to evaluate the impact, incidence, and probability of any legal risk’s happening by analogy with the precedent court cases elsewhere. Second, there is a key difference between Macao as a small jurisdiction and the other jurisdictions above in that the former is inevitably short of a substantial volume of local precedent court cases. This dearth of local precedent court cases substantively hinders a project manager from evaluating the impact, incidence, and probability of any legal concern’s or risk’s happening.