Choosing Litigation, Adjudication or Mediation
If you first learned about adjudication when you received a Notice out of the blue followed by multiple ringbinders of documents just before you were about to go away on holiday, you will know from painful experience the need to be alert and informed about this dispute resolution process. Your contract must provide for disputes to be referred to adjudication if it is a "construction contract" (as defined by statute), but you have some latitude over the rules and the timetable for the process. We can suggest suitable rules and adjudicators for your dispute. The cost of the process can be very high and be incurred very rapidly, as statements of case, factual and expert evidence, and meetings and site visits may all be crammed into a 28-day period - and the whole process may then be repeated in court.
Your first encounter with mediation may have been when a judge stopped the case you were involved in and told you and your opponent to go away and try it. The National Mediation Helpline is there to refer you to one of a number of mediator-appointing bodies who will put forward several of their mediators for your consideration. If your dispute relates to a construction and engineering contract, however, why not come straight to us? We can offer more flexible arrangements tailored to your needs: in particular, we can discuss whether a hybrid process combining mediation and early neutral evaluation would be appropriate.
If you want your dispute determined finally, you may prefer court to adjudication. But you should remember that the Court will expect you to have complied with its Pre-action Protocol. This can slow things down, and if you are on the receiving end of a claim, it will give you time to assess your opponent's case before you become embroiled in formal proceedings. We can help you carry out this assessment and explore settlement options before the costs mount up; should no settlement be achieved, however, we can pursue or defend your claim with intelligent vigour. We approach arbitration upon a similar basis: an arbitrator appointed under the Arbitration Act 1996 may well also look at the parties' pre-action conduct when deciding his award of costs.
