Legal Advice on Construction Contract Delays

Legal Advice on Construction Contract Delays 1
Legal Advice on Construction Contract Delays
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Legal Advice on Construction Contract Delays 2
Introduction
As revealed from the case, the disputes over construction engineering cases are nothing
more than quality disputes, construction time disputes and contract price disputes. In the same
case, the three types of disputes are often cross-affected and entangled with each other. Among
them, the responsibility for delay in construction is the most complicated. If the construction
period is delayed solely due to one party's reasons, if the contractor has not provided a
construction site that meets the requirements of the contract, the construction period is delayed,
and its liability is relatively simple. However, in reality, there are often multiple events that cause
delays in construction schedules, and they may cross over, including both the contractor event
and the contractor event. It is very complicated to determine the responsibility for the delay of
the project due to multiple events and cross-reasons. It is difficult for people without engineering
expertise and legal background knowledge to make accurate judgments. From the case, it is clear
that there are numerous contract violation. Some violations are due to unavoidable circumstances
whereas others are due to inability of some parties to adhere to what they promised when signing
the contract agreement. The purpose of the paper is to offer legal advise to the affected parties
such as the Estates Officer of Newtown University and the Delta.
Legal advice to parties involved
To start with, it is important to emphasize the fact that in the practice of construction
contract, the developer (contractor) and the contractor (contractor) are always partners, but they
always have conflicts and disputes that are difficult to reconcile in the process of cooperation.
Legal litigation often makes them exhaust other disputes After the route, the last resort to protect
the rights. Although legal litigation is not a dispute settlement method that parties are willing to
adopt and accept, in the face of sharp contradictions and major economic interests, legal

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litigation is a topic they have to face together. The characteristics of construction project contract
disputes are: the subject matter of the case is large, the dispute is large, the professionalism is
strong, the contract execution cycle is long, the facts involved are numerous and complicated,
and the amount of evidence is large. Because of this, the parties generally hire lawyers to
represent them in disputes over construction contracts. Therefore, the representation of lawyers
in such cases can be said to be of great responsibility, and how the acting lawyers formulate
litigation strategies and use litigation techniques will determine whether the client's expected
goals can be achieved.
As a contractor, such as a real estate developer, before the project is completed and
accepted, the most worrying issue is the lag in the progress of the project, which will directly
lead to a longer project development cycle, delayed capital recovery, increased development
costs, and may delay business opportunities. What's more serious, the real estate project may be
overdue due to the delay of the project, and it will face a huge liquidation penalty to the buyers.
Therefore, before the project is completed and accepted and the construction project is handed
over, the developer should adopt the principle of focusing on large and small, and try to avoid
the intensification of contradictions caused by non-principle disputes to ensure that the project
progress is on schedule, solve key issues, and maximize benefits. . For example: a consultant unit
develops a real estate project, and the contractor asks the developer to increase labor costs due to
repeated adjustments in labor costs. After the negotiation fails, the contractor stops work. The
project is nearing completion and the delivery deadline is approaching. We have carefully
considered and analyzed : The normal completion of the project, acceptance and delivery, the
developer may realize a profit of hundreds of millions of yuan; although there is still some
controversy as to whether labor costs should be supplemented, if the dispute is resolved by

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justice, it will take a lot of time, Inevitably delaying the completion of the acceptance check and
the timely delivery of the house may cause inestimable losses to the developer. This solution is
obviously not in the interests of our clients. In such instance, it is suggested that the client make a
concession, and the other party also adopted a strategy of taking advantage of the good. The two
sides finally resolved the dispute through friendly negotiations and achieved a win-win result.
The construction contract usually stipulates that when the contractor suspends work
without proper reasons or the node project lags to a certain extent, the contractor has the right to
investigate the other party's liability for breach of contract and has the right to terminate the
contract. But if this happens, is it in the interests of the issuer to exercise the right to terminate
the contract according to the contract? As in the case above, this obviously requires serious
consideration. In this case, once the contracting party terminates the contract through litigation,
the project will inevitably stop for a long time, because this type of lawsuit may involve the
quality evaluation of the completed project, the determination of the quantity of the project, and
the evaluation of the construction cost (Cakmak & Cakmak, 2013). The long term may be
delayed to one year or two years or even longer. After the lengthy litigation process is over, it
may also involve enforcement issues. Forcing the other party to withdraw from the field and
forcing the other party to transfer the information of the phased projects (including hidden
projects) will definitely take longer. time. It can be seen that, as a last resort, even if the
Employer has the “Shangfang Sword” with the “right to terminate the contract”, he cannot use it
at will. Of course, legal proceedings have the same legal risks for the contractor. For example,
after the contractor is forced to exercise the right to terminate the contract, the contractor not
only loses the expected profit of the project, but also may suffer huge claims from the contractor.
Therefore, if either party brings a lawsuit to terminate the contract, the consequences of both