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Cadweb helps to save a client £10,000,000
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February 2010
A Happy New Year to everyone! We were able to help one of our clients get an early surprise Christmas present! Unfortunately they became involved in a legal dispute on one of their developments. Luckily they had the foresight to employ Cadweb to provide the Project Extranet so we were able to provide support and training for the legal team during the pre-trial period. Helped by the clear, complete and undisputed audit trail, the client was able to negotiate a settlement just before Christmas in excess of £10,000,000 without having to go to court!
The client was an internationally known Property Owner and Developer. The project was a multi phase, inner city site with restricted access in Central London. The scheme contained both residential and commercial elements.
The disputed project was one part of a much bigger, multi-stage urban regeneration masterplan undertaken by the client, with a budget of more than £150m. The Client had appointed well known designers, cost managers and contractors to the project.
The client used in-house Development Managers to manage the multiple project teams all at differing stages of their individual sub-projects. The client’s employment of Cadweb.net gave them an overview of the entire masterplan as well as the ability to ‘drill down’ into a specific sub-project as and when required. Cadweb.net could also generate a legally admissible audit trail and history of any specific design, cost or commercial information.
THE DISPUTED CLAIM
The design and construction of one sub-project, valued at £45m, resulted in a claim of £16,000,000 for unnecessary cost escalations. The sub-project’s audit trail of over 480,000 documents and drawings, all stored on Cadweb.net, were used to fulfil the requirements of the Discovery process. Cadweb.net reduced the time and cost of this process significantly.
Using Cadweb.net the client’s litigation team were able to provide a complete, audited and searchable database of all the project information to the defendant’s team, less any privileged information. This was relied upon by both sides as it came from a ‘Trusted Third Party’.
Also the Cadweb.net database could be interrogated instantly by both sides, rather than having to rely on the provision of individual organisations’ project records, which consisted of a mixture of email and paper. In the past, all these incomplete and often unreliable records would have been input onto a database to make this volume of information usable; a laborious, costly and time consuming exercise prone to errors and omissions.
THE RESULT
As a result of the efficient disclosure of a complete project archive the strength of the client’s case quickly became apparent. The claim was swiftly settled in favour of the client by negotiation rather than requiring protracted court proceedings. This saved much time and considerable cost. The settlement involved an agreement to pay in excess of £10,000,000 to the client.
CONCLUSION
Cadweb.net reduces the risks inherent in a construction project. If a dispute does arise Cadweb.net will help to rationalize the legal process and thus keep costs down. Cadweb also enables a legal team to evaluate the strength of a case much faster, eliminating ‘grey areas’, helping both sides reach a settlement sooner than they might otherwise have been able to.
CONDITIONS NECESSARY FOR SUCCESS OF THE SYSTEM
There are three conditions that need to be met if a system of this nature is to be successful in this role:
- The legally admissible of the audit trail must be beyond question which requires, as a minimum, certification to ISO 27001 ‘Information Security Management’ and compliance with BS 10008 `Evidential Weight and Legal Admissibility of Electronic Information’.
- The files in question (and therefore their requisite audit trails) must be on the system and not sent by other means (Disk, Post, email) all of which remain available to users.
- The system provider must be a ‘Trusted Third party’ as opposed to a party with a vested interest in the contract (often this is the Main Contractor)
CONCLUSION
- A relatively large claim can arise compared to the value of the project.
- The result of a claim often depends upon a very small number of document/drawings compared to the total volume of information created.
- The availability of a complete audited and searchable record of all disclosed information significantly speeds up the legal process keeping costs to a minimum.
- A complete audited and searchable record helps to clarify the strength of the claim, facilitating the faster agreement of a mutually acceptable settlement, preventing protracted legal proceedings and costs.
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Ends
For further information please contact Francis Newman on 0208 964 5040.
Notes to Editors
- Founded in 1995 Cadweb is the longest and oldest, established project extranet provider in the UK. Cadweb is now recognized as the de facto market leader in it's field with a long and growing list of blue-chip clients. Project Extranets provide an internet based central searchable repository for project information whereby project data can be stored and retrieved by all members of a construction project.
- Cadweb.net provides an internet based, central, highly searchable repository for all project information, whereby project data can be stored and retrieved by all members of a construction project.
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