Reconciling and recovering £500k of increased costs

Our client is MEP sub-contractor providing design and build solutions for its clients across the UK. On one of its projects, it had suffered significant time delays (25 weeks) and additional costs (c.£500k) caused by late access, and ongoing dialogue had not resolved the issues. We were commissioned to support our client in achieving a negotiated settlement whilst ensuring the matter could be referred to adjudication if negotiation discussions were unsuccessful.

There were two tracks to our approach. The first track involved finding ways to improve our client’s short term cash position. We did this by finding areas of the account which where we considered improvement in the certified position was possible, and we worked with our client to exert pressure on these areas of the account. This resulted in an immediate £120k improvement in our client’s cash position and acknowledged entitlement to be compensated for the late access issues.

The second track was more involved as we re-structured the claim by identifying the events which had caused critical delay, working with the client to calculate the delay period caused by the event, and calculating the loss and expense associated with each event. We worked with our client to prepare a fully substantiated report which set out these events and made a claim for the time and cost associated with the events by reference to a clause of the sub-contract.

This has provided our client with a strong platform to achieve a negotiated settlement of the final account.