Establishing Dispute Boards - Selecting, Nominating and Appointing Board Members

Nicholas Gould

December 2006

A paper given at the Society of Construction Law International Conference in Singapore, 16th-17th October 2006.

Dispute Boards are becoming more common on construction projects and much effort has gone into providing legal and advisory frameworks to encourage them to function effectively. Nicholas Gould looks at the growth in use of these Boards, Dispute Advisory Boards (DABs) and Dispute eview Boards (DBs) and hybrids, with a special focus on the methods by which they can be set up and their members selected and appointed at the start of a project. He does so with many examples from the institutional documents providing for Dispute Boards, eg from the Dispute eview Board Foundation, FIDIC, the AAA, the ICC and the ICE.

Introduction - Dispute Boards: a brief overview - Growth in US project with DBs - From DB to DAB and beyond - The development of international Dispute Boards - Procedural rules - Appointing a Dispute Board: contractual procedures compared - Selecting Bispute Board members - The obligations and qualities of Dispute Board members - How are Dispute Board members selected in practice? - Default appointments - eplacing Dispute Board members - The initial Dispute Board meeting - The move towards legislation for international adjudication - Conclusions.

The author: Nicholas Gould is chairman of the Society of Construction Law and a partner of the law firm Fenwick Elliott LLP.

Text and appendix: 37 pages

PDF file size: 324k