Construction litigation is notoriously time-consuming and costly, writes Kim Franklin, particularly if all the knotty problems that can turn up on any project end up in court. Hence the introduction of the construction and engineering protocol, that encourages parties to settle before they begin proceedings, and the potential usefulness of adjudication during the course of a project to solve things as you go along. But since these methods need the parties to behave in a sensible, commercial fashion, there are still occasions when the opposite sides end up slugging it out to the end. HHJ Wilcox recently gave judgment about costs in Skanska v Egger (2 March 2005). In this case, concerning construction of a factory that took less that a year to build, litigation took five years. The net winner was Skanska, which recovered about ￡2.8 million. The costs were about ￡9 million.
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