Apart from domestic building, the commercial reality of the construction industry in Australia is that contractors (builders and professional consultants) usually don’t have much commercial leverage compared to their clients. This means contractors are rarely able to put forward their own contracts or insist upon changes to the terms of their clients’ contracts they think are unreasonable. One of the main objectives of this book is to describe a way for contractors to think about and apply legal rules for the interpretation of contracts to help them manage their commercial bargaining disadvantage.
The Art of Coarse Contract Negotiation contains quite a lot of technical legal content and the approach to the formation of contracts it describes may best be applied by legally qualified contract reviewers. In-house lawyers employed by contractors in the construction industry are probably most well placed to make full use of the ideas in this book. However, I hope that contract reviewers without legal qualifications but with experience working on contracts and in the commercial side of construction contracting generally will also find this book interesting and useful. To that end, explanations of legal concepts intended to assist non-lawyer readers are included, even though many lawyers may find some of it unnecessary.
The Art of Coarse Contract Negotiation is not a reference text or a comprehensive “how to” manual for analysing and amending all the different types of commercial terms which may be included in a construction contract. It’s intended to be a readable description of an approach to the review and negotiation of client-prepared construction contracts which is supported with several detailed examples. The book will be most useful to contract reviewers willing to practice applying the ideas in it to provisions beyond the scope of the illustrations provided.
