Defending a $680 million delay and disruption claim

The contractor claimed extensions of time and associated costs across four separate delay events, three of which the client accepted had occurred. The dispute was about concurrency, causation, and whether the contractor had complied with the notice regime that conditioned its entitlement.

The client had lived with the project for six years. Its site teams had generated an enormous contemporaneous record, none of it created with an arbitration in mind, and much of it unhelpful on first reading.

We treated the record as the primary evidence rather than as background to the delay experts. Over four months we built a single chronology from site correspondence, progress reports, and instruction logs, and required both our factual witnesses and our programming expert to work from it exclusively.

That chronology established that two of the four events had not been notified within the contractual period, and that a third was concurrent with a delay for which the contractor was responsible.

We resisted the temptation to run every available argument. Two defenses that were arguable but weakly supported were abandoned before the hearing, which materially shortened cross-examination and, in the tribunal's later reasoning, made the surviving defenses more credible.

The tribunal awarded the contractor approximately nine percent of the claimed sum and made no award of costs against the client.

The client adopted the chronology methodology as standing practice on its subsequent projects, and instructed our Singapore office to review the dispute resolution provisions in its next two construction contracts before signature.