Every dog has its day … in court!
Chihuahuas…Retrievers…even St Bernards…Our evening constitutional round the Mid-Levels brings my wife and I into contact with a wide range of our canine friends, in varying degrees mostly unsuitable for living in the confines of the average Hong Kong apartment. However, I eye these mutts with new respect, following the influence of a particularly well-qualified pooch called Lulu, on a recent decision of the Technology & Construction Court in London.
IT supplier EDS is to pay a total of GB£318 million to settle a dispute over a contract which it entered into 10 years ago with the broadcaster BSkyB . This payment marks the end of one of the IT industry’s longest-running and most expensi [...]
A parting of the cloud
When is it safe to terminate under a contract?
Volcanoes – we have rather a lot of them in Asia, but even we’ve been obsessing about the infamous Icelandic one, this week. Though 6000 or more miles away from the action, Japanese car manufacturers relying on components from Ireland and Korean mobile phone suppliers ready to send their wireless wares to a waiting world, have been among those frustrated as the volcanic ash cloud has choked airfreight routes. Which got me thinking…not so much about force majeure (I’ll leave that to my holidaying partners examining their insurance documents to seek support for their compensation claims!) but about the options a contracting party faces when th [...]
When a ‘notice’ need not be ‘noticed’
Opening the mailbox at my Hong Kong apartment block brings the usual array of bills, more bills, flyers and…what appear to be ‘notices’ (usually from my landlord): but as we know from the world of construction law, often it is argued that what is intended to be a ‘notice’ fails to meet up to the strict requirements of the contract.
Yet, how many reported cases are there where the notice provision is strictly enforced? Most commentators struggle to point to a decision where a contractor was deprived of his ability to claim an extension of time solely on the basis of non-compliance with a notice provision. The point sometimes seems more of academic interest than practical applicatio [...]
