Contract Advice and Review
Viviad’s Chartered Quantity Surveyors provide a flexible, bespoke service that is tailored to meet the client needs and budget and can be tailored to suit the Employers, Main Contractors or Subcontractors.
Understanding the contract is one of the prerequisites to execute and manage it. Contract advice and review thus ties very closely with sound contract administration and solid commercial management. Most Standard Forms of Contract are nowadays modified. Most contracts are also lengthy and full of legal jargon. Questionable boilerplate clauses, unclear definitions and obligations, hair-raising incorporation of terms, poorly defined defined terms and many other surprises are waiting to catch you on each page of the contract.
Our review will provide you with a pragmatic approach to contracts and furnish you with the core information on:
- Particular concerns about the contract together with further clarifications. These may range not only from technical aspects related with the structure of the contract and the way it is organised, but also its compliance with the law and regulations in force
- A list of issues that are likely to impede the contract’s future performance or potentially lead to contentious arguments with other parties
- Detailed suggestions on how to rectify the identified flaws or ambiguities, together with a check of how the ‘old’ and ‘new’ contracts incorporate and document the deal terms
- An additional list of unstated legal obligations and most important clauses in the contract
Why would you choose a review by us over, say, a review by a solicitor?
There is a multitude of reasons, although it is true that such move may at first sight appear to be illogical. Firstly, we are not only legally trained, but also we have spent years on various sites deepening our daily participatory knowledge. In other words, we know how the so-called real world operates. Secondly, because we understand the project lifecycle and disputes, we know what contractual essentials one needs to look for and how they should be defined.
While lawyers will review the contract strictly from the legal perspective, we will carry a review to ensure the contract is both, legally sound, but also efficient from the perspective of the overall project lifecycle and correctly apportions the risk. Thirdly, our reviews are always informed by other project documentation, which lawyers do not know how to read and interpret. These may not only be items such as complex Bills of Quantities but also project schedules, advanced performance forecasts and so on.