Earlier in the year, I made an April Fool’s Day joke on Twitter about the Supreme Court granting an appeal in a construction dispute. Apparently, the joke was on me…because the Supreme Court did take an appeal in a construction dispute!
On December 3, 2013, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in In re Atl.
I have often wondered whether there is such a thing as too small a dispute. Well, the parties in Earl Faulkner v. Tom Emmett Construction Company (pdf) determined to take their $3,000 construction dispute to the Tennessee Court of Appeals. In the end, the Court gave some good instructions on the "first material breach" rule, which
As a general proposition, if the owner delays the prime contractor by not performing its contractual obligations, the prime contractor is entitled to relief, including damages for delay or extensions of time. This is actually a rather common situation and most contracts contain clauses and provisions that govern such occasions. But what happens when the
Last week, I saw a Tweet about the United States Supreme Court granting certiorari in a construction dispute … and I thought it had to be an April Fools’ Day joke because they never take construction cases on appeal. So, being quite the jokester, I naturally sent out the following Tweet:
Well, the joke is on
Yes, there are limits to what parties can include in a construction contract. For example, many states like Tennessee have choice of law and venue statutes that make it unlawful to include a provision in a contract requiring the substantive laws of another state or the venue of litigation/arbitration in another state for real estate
While I generally limit my guest posts to my fellow law partners, I simply could not resist sharing with you today’s post from my friend and construction attorney, Scott Wolfe, Jr., which focuses on Best Practices for filing mechanics liens and bond claims.
Continue Reading Mechanics Lien and Bond Claims Best Practices
We all have preconceptions about the language you might find on the construction project. However, it is not every day that you read a court opinion and you find the following language: "…nor is it the business of the federal courts generally to clean up the language and conduct of construction sites." This came from
You can imagine that with seven young children in our house, there are a substantial number of arguments on any given day. When both my wife and I are at home, the question becomes, Who decides disputes: Mom or Dad? In the construction arena, the same types of questions arise.
Recently, in Bechtel Do
I was working in our Virginia office this past week and was amazed at the amount of highway construction at and around Tyson’s Corner. What also caught my attention was the progress of the 495 Express Lanes project, which includes the construction of high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes that will operate on the I-495/Capital Beltway.
One of the largest groups for construction lawyers is the American Bar Association’s Forum on the Construction Industry. In the weeks leading up to to the Forum’s 2012 annual meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada last month, a number of construction attorneys and I were feverishly reviewing submissions for Division 10’s annual Construction Law Update.