Inaugural Meeting of the Adjudication Society

It was standing room only for the inaugural meeting of the Society in London on 24 May 2000. We are indebted to Messrs Ashurst Morris Crisp, Solicitors, for generously making their facilities available at short notice when it became apparent that the attendance would be too large for the original venue. The total attendance was 160.

Geoffrey Hawker welcomed all those in attendance to the inaugural meeting. The keynote address was then given by Neil Kaplan QC, outgoing President of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. Mr Kaplan was enthusiastic about the formation of the Adjudication Society and offered the co-operation, support and backing of the Chartered Institute. He spoke of the rising numbers of adjudication appointments from various adjudicator nominating bodies and related his personal experiences of adjudication boards in Hong Kong - ending with some encouraging statistics from the Dispute Review Board Foundation in the USA.

There followed three short presentations on various aspects of adjudication. Tony Bingham, barrister, arbitrator, adjudicator and commentator, spoke in his usual entertaining way and reminded the meeting why adjudication had arisen - the failure of litigation and construction to resolve disputes in a speedy and cost-effective manner. He reviewed the decided cases, extracting from them the guidance to adjudication offered by the courts. Mr Bingham stressed the investigative nature of adjudication and urged adjudicators to be robust and innovative in their approaches.

He challenged the new Society to take adjudication beyond the realms of construction and into other branches of commerce.

The second presentation was from Geoff Brewer, a well-known author on dispute matters and the principal of Brewer Consulting. Mr Brewer gave a thought-provoking list of 25 matters in adjudication that the decided cases have not yet touched upon. His list covered payment issues, withholding monies, rights of suspension, jurisdiction, adjudicator's powers, enforcement and miscellaneous matters. Time did not permit a full answer to each point, so members went away with a written summary of the questions to ponder at their leisure.

Finally, Robert Stevenson, construction solicitor and author of a book on adjudication, highlighted two particular areas of adjudication that had caused difficulty. First, when does a matter become a dispute; and, secondly, how can slips and errors in adjudicator's decisions be corrected?

The meeting closed with wine and snacks, provided by courtesy of the Chambers of Geoffrey Hawker at 46 Essex Street.