This article considers the implications of a Party referring a dispute to adjudication concerning a quotation for a compensation event which has been treated as having been accepted, in accordance with the deeming provisions of Core Clause 6 of the NEC3 Form of Contract.
Alan Williamson
A conundrum that has often arisen upon projects administered under the Engineering and Construction Contract upon which I have been involved concerns where the dividing line falls between the actual Defined Cost of the work already done and the forecast Defined Cost of the work not yet done, particularly when the compensation event is assessed retrospectively by an adjudicator.
Until relatively recently it had been the accepted position that the Notice of Adjudication framed and set the boundaries of any dispute referred to adjudication. Leading on from this the Responding Party’s defence could only respond upon the subject matter of the dispute as set out within the Notice of Adjudication. However, a number of cases over the last two years appear to have moved the goalposts somewhat, in allowing the Responding Party to widen the boundaries of the dispute framed within the Notice of Adjudication.