The fifth season of Tools for Success, a popular series of seminars hosted by the WeirFoulds Construction Law Practice Group throughout the spring and fall, recently concluded after five successful and well-attended webcast sessions. Following their coverage of prior seasons, Daily Commercial News has featured seminars from Season 5, speaking to WeirFoulds Partners and Tools for Success hosts Krista Chaytor and Jeff Scorgie to learn more about the season’s key topics and takeaways.
“Technology vastly changing e-discovery process: WeirFoulds webinar speaker”
“Dealing with a Deluge of Documents”, which featured guest speaker Crystal O’Donnell (CEO and Senior Counsel) of Heuristica Discovery Counsel, focused on the difficulties that can arise from a lack of preparedness to manage documents during dispute resolution.
Jeff touched upon the importance of preserving documents and ensuring a system is in place to avoid the deletion of important information, stating “I see it’s certainly more common now in contracts for larger projects […] to preserve key documents and records for sometimes very long periods of time after the project has concluded — two, five, even seven years also coupled with a very extensive audit right.”
“Contract cheat sheet critical at the outset of a project”
Krista and Jeff were joined by Bree Krull (Manager, Commercial Risk) of PCL Constructors Canada Inc. for “The First Three Months of a Construction Contract”. The session emphasized how critical it is to have a “contract cheat sheet” to guide the initial stage of a project’s lifespan, and to ensure that all parties know the full details of the contract in order to avoid any potential issues.
“The bottom line is [to] know your contract and have a transparent conversation at the beginning of the contract. I find it’s helpful throughout the build,” said Krul. “If you don’t know your contract then you are not going to have a fulsome understanding of the different requirements.”
“‘Golden goose’ of project delays is unforeseen site conditions: WeirFoulds”
True to its title, “Delays on Construction Projects” dealt with how unexpected circumstances, a failure to effectively and comprehensively plan, and poor management can lead to projects becoming delayed, and how best to prevent harmful delays from happening.
“Plan, plan, plan and figure out a way to manage issues you know are going to create risk going forward in the project,” said Krista. “This is really probably the number one thing you can do. Just be ready because there are going to be hiccups obviously and the issue is how do you handle them, did you anticipate them and were you ready for them.”
Guest speaker Robert Garven, Directory of Revay, elaborated on how poor communication of plans or specifications can often be the culprit of these delays, stating “When this happens it places a huge burden on the construction projects and these are a major cause, if not the major cause, of disputes that we see. These just need to be communicated as soon as they are discovered, as early in the project as possible so that both sides can resolve these as quickly as possible.”
To learn more about the Construction Law Practice Group, please visit their page here.
Krista Chaytor can be contacted by phone at (416) 947-5074 and by email at kchaytor@weirfoulds.com.
Jeff Scorgie can be contacted by phone at (416) 619-6288 and by email at jscorgie@weirfoulds.com.
