Administrative Activities and Roles for Minimizing the Encountering of Defects in Construction Contract Documents

Abstract

The construction contract documents clarify the scope of the intended work and serve to legally bind the parties to their defined or implied responsibilities, rights, duties, and liabilities in respect of the executed contract. It is not uncommon that contract documents are found to be defective, often leading to the arising of disputes. Recent literature revealed a set of recommendations for improving the quality of contract documents. These call on project owners to: know what you want, describe it very clearly, not assume that the other party knows what you want, tell them what you want, and not change your mind. However, these are only high-level theoretical guidelines that require validation. Considering the severity of the consequences resulting from having defective documents in a construction project, along with the gap shown in the literature, this study aims at identifying the administrative activities and roles of the concerned project parties that could help minimize the encountering of defects in construction contract documents. This was done through a case law analysis of a set of fifty disputes that revolved around several types of deficiencies in contract documents. The case law review enabled the identification of the classes for the basis of defects that are prone to be the source of dispute. This helps the owner in knowing the areas of contract documents drafting that should be improved. Second, a validation of the righteousness of previously suggested theoretical guidelines was performed. Following that, the court rulings of the adopted cases were fully scrutinized to infer the detrimental practices that owners should avoid to eliminate having such documents being held in error. The findings showed 18 practical inferences that represent the root causes behind the occurrence of the studied disputes. Furthermore, an analysis was performed on the deduced inferences to identify the characteristics of the intervention of the concerned project parties in avoiding the occurrence of defects. The characteristics represent the reason behind the intervention expected of each party, the timing of their intervention, the documents in which they should intervene, and their scope and means of intervention. These were used to identify the attributed functional roles and activities that should be followed by concerned project entities during the preconstruction phase to minimize defects in contract documents. That said, this study succeeded in developing the previously suggested theoretical guidelines for enhancing the quality of contract documents by formulating practical ways of adopting them.