The profile of construction disputes

Abstract

Dispute in construction industry always occur and can be attested by many court cases reported in court proceedings, various law journals and law reports. Construction disputes can have serious implication in construction project. The project may suffer cost and time overrun, the owner may suffer significant loss and profit and worst still the project may be abandoned or failed. This is because construction is a complex process involving of many activities, myriads of individual, different company or firms, different size, part of country with different skills and capabilities and always subject to changing environment. The issues are which elements is actually the common subject matter of the disputes? What is the nature of the disputes? Who are the parties involved? What type of the project? When do the disputes occur? And what kind of standard form of the project? Therefore, the objectives of this study is to develop profile of construction disputes fature or characteristic of the dispute where consists of the nature of the disputes, the parties involved, type of the project, time of the disputes occurred, and standard form of contract for the project. Limitation of this study will be on the construction disputes reported by Malayan Law Journal between 1997-2007, cases in Malaysia and related to Building Contract only while the methodology of this study will be based on the secondary data analysis. Research finding identified that the common nature of construction disputes is payment and the disputes are related to non payment of certified sums and mislead in payment procedure according to terms of standard form of contract. The most party involved in construction disputes are between the employer and the main contractor. The analysis also identified that the most disputes occurred during construction phase and mostly involved of building construction while PAM Standard Form of Contract is the most form of contract that involved in construction disputes. By developing this profile, hopefully it will help the project manager in anticipate the common disputes at early stage of the project. Besides as a tool in contract management, this profile definitely helps to prevent or minimize the disputes in Malaysian construction industry.