ADMINISTERING CONDITION PRECEDENT NOTICES IN CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTS

Notices represent a main area of concern for engineering and architecture professionals involved in construction contract administration, as the failure to satisfy their requirements can jeopardize the concerned party’s performance under the contract. This is specifically true of those notices that are stated or inferred to be condition precedent to the preservation or the establishment of the rights of either party. A screening of all instances stipulating the issuance of notices under the standard conditions for the construction contract issued by the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC) revealed that 41 out of the 93 encountered instances require condition-precedent notices to be issued for preserving or establishing relevant rights. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the three classes that were found to encompass these notices. As such, it sheds light on the distribution of the responsibilities for issuing them between the contractor, on one hand, and the owner or the Engineer on his behalf, on the other hand. It further discusses possible compositions of their structures, highlighting the time bars as well as the prerequisite events that are likely to be involved. The merit of the work lies in mapping these notices, with the aim of helping contract administration practitioners properly deal with them such that the contractual risks associated with their requirements can be avoided.