Disputes in time bar provisions for contractors' claims in standard form of contracts

The time bar clause facilitates informing the Engineer (Contract Administrator) in a timely manner of the occurrence of events that may result in delayed completion and/or incur additional costs. Such notices allow parties to mitigate any potential impacts in terms of time and/or cost. Nevertheless, the time bar clause forfeits a contractor’s claim, if the notice of claim is not submitted within the stipulated time in the contract, giving rise to numerous disputes. The purpose of this study is to identify the disputes surrounding the time bar clause in the FIDIC 1999 Red Book, which is an internationally used Standard Form of Contract (SFoC) for building and engineering works designed by the employer. After identifying the sources of disputes and modifications to the standard provisions via a comprehensive literature review, the researchers conducted an online questionnaire survey with 61 construction contract professionals (employers, contract consultants and contractors) and semi-structured interviews with four contract specialists to determine the level of agreement with the identified sources of disputes and modifications to standard provisions. Sources of disputes and modifications were ranked based on the Relative Agreement Index (RAI) from the survey. Interviews were qualitatively analyzed to identify agreement/disagreement and the reasons for the agreement/disagreement.