International Construction Law Review
BOOK REVIEW
Quantifying and Managing Disruption Claims.
By Hamish Lal. London: Thomas Telford. 2002. 303 pp. ISBN 07277–3165–3. Hardback. Price £50.
Records! Records! Records! It is a theme that has been repeated so often by so many people (including the UK Society of Construction Law in its Delay and Disruption Protocol) that one might be tempted to think that it should not need further elaboration. However, in his book Hamish Lal has gone a few steps further. Here he not only identifies what records are needed, why and how they should be collated but then goes on to show what is to be done with them and what that provides in practice when measured against four separate projects.
The underlying theme of his book is that the challenge of proving that loss and expense has been suffered as a result of disruption caused by matters at the employer’s risk must be met, first of all, by the way the project is measured, then by the way it is planned, thirdly, by keeping an auditable record of what is achieved against the plan. It all sounds pretty obvious. But it does not take a great deal of experience of construction and engineering claims to realise that it is the absence of the obviously necessary that generates most disputes.
Lal favours a method of quantifying cost by reference to operational bills of quantity that will enable the user to price the work in a way that is transparent to a resource based programme of work. This is the start. When on site he describes the records to be kept by the various activity-headed “gangers” to facilitate the drawing of a relationship between the planned work content, method and resources and the resources actually required to meet the changed conditions under which the contractor is required to work from time to time.
So far, so good, but it gets better. Not only has the theory been thus set out but then it has been run through four fundamentally different projects in order to demonstrate the application of the process to the actual facts of specific contracts on site.
This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Lal is clearly a mathematician. He first read civil engineering and finished up as a lawyer specialising in construction and engineering law—a powerful mixture, and it shows. At first blush, the style gives the impression that the book might have been written as a research thesis but it has not. It has been written as a guide to an industry on a subject that needs much guidance. Much of what is set out is extremely complex but the process of absorption of the material is made substantially easier than it might otherwise have been by an introductory preface and a closing “practical conclusions” to each chapter and then there are appendices setting out the materials used to gather the facts for the examples.
[2004
The International Construction Law Review
262