Litigation management process in construction industry

Abstract

For an Engineering, Procurement and Construction Management contract, collaboration between the different actors is essential from the very beginning of the project to consider all the constraints. Working upstream reduces the occurrence of problems that could lead to claims. As long as trust and dialogue are present, disputes can be settled by agreement, but if dialogue is cut off, the negotiation phases are over. The solution is then to move to alternative dispute resolution methods involving outside third-party mediator. If, despite this, no agreement is reached, the last option is to proceed to legal proceedings. This paper develops a litigation management process for the construction industry in Quebec (Canada) to guide future litigation project managers, whether they are on the plaintiffs of the defendant’s side of the claim. The proposed process links the litigation team members, lawyers and experts. The process divided into ten phases, contains sequences of activities, resources, input and output documents and deliverables. The process was validated in terms of standardization in order to assess its capability to support different construction types of projects and contracts. With this process, litigation managers will be able to oversee litigation through a better visibility of the activities to be planned and forecast costs.