From the Co-Chairs – Construction Law International – July 2023

Dear ICP Committee members,

By the time you read this, many of you will already be looking forward to the summer holidays, at least in the northern hemisphere. January is only a vague memory, and time seems to travel at the speed of light again, despite the fact that we try to break every hour into small increments in our timesheets.

This first half of 2023 was marked by two magnificent ICP events. In March, the 8th Biennial Conference on Construction Projects From Conception to Completion took place in Berlin, Germany, after it had to be postponed due to the Covid pandemic. This conference had a record number of delegates in its long history, with well over 160 people signing up. We would like to thank not only the sponsors and speakers of this conference, but also Rupert Choat and Rouven Bodenheimer for all their hard work in putting together a great programme.  Not only was it a pleasure to see so many familiar faces, but also to meet a lot of new friends. In the past, this conference was sometimes referred to as ‘the young lawyers’ conference’. Although we still wish we could be regarded as the young ones, the truth is that over the years, this conference has attracted fewer younger lawyers than hoped for. In our evaluation we will make plans to reach out to more junior construction lawyers for the 2025 edition of this conference. Compared to the much larger IBA Annual Conference, this conference provides for an excellent opportunity to share experiences and to meet with other professionals in construction law, certainly for younger lawyers.

Our second event was the traditional ICP Working Weekend, which was held on 5–7 May in Mendoza, Argentina. For those of you who are not familiar with this Working Weekend, it is an event where a small group of about 60 ICP members meet to discuss construction law-related topics, during sessions that are prepared by the three ICP subcommittees. This Working Weekend started with a reception on Friday evening, during which we enjoyed an opera performance. The traditional excursion and dinner on Saturday evening took us to a wine tasting at a prestigious winery just outside Mendoza. Being in Mendoza, the wine capital of Argentina, it will not come as a surprise that a wine tasting had to be on the programme. The Working Weekend was concluded with our business meeting on Sunday, during which we discussed ICP-related topics such as how ICP could be more beneficial to its members and what possible topics for the 2024 IBA Annual Conference we could suggest. We hope to share some of the results of this discussion in future editions of CLInt. It was a pleasure to see that many ICP members took the effort of traveling all the way to Mendoza for this Working Weekend. We would like to thank our past Co-Chair Ricardo Barreiro-Deymonnaz and his wonderful team for their efforts in making this Working Weekend an unforgettable memory for all participants.

As you may have seen in our email to ICP members inviting them to express their interest in speaking at the IBA Annual Conference in Paris, France, later this year, we are in the midst of preparing the panels for the ICP sessions during this conference. We intend to have all our panels ready by mid-July. The ICP will be leading the following sessions at the Annual Conference: ‘When government and social goals meet the reality of construction contracting’; ‘EPC on trial – does fixed-price EPC deliver the results promised?’; ‘The growing demand for energy transition infrastructure – novel procurement models and dispute resolution regimes’; ‘Economic crisis, unforeseen circumstances and contract rebalancing’;  and finally, ‘Breaking up is hard to do? Lessons learned and preparations that can be made to ease the pain of litigation and contract termination’. Further details on these sessions can be found on the IBA website. Of course, we will also have our traditional excursion on Friday and the ICP dinner on Wednesday evening. This year the dinner will be a special one, as we will have our ‘hard hat ceremony’, initiating the incoming ICP Co-Chairs and introducing the new ICP officers for 2024–2026. We do hope to see many ICP members during our sessions and the social functions in Paris.

Before we travel to Paris, however, we wish you all a pleasant vacation and hope that you will be able to enjoy the summer and this new edition of CLInt, before the hectic last months of the year begin.

Joseph Moore
Hanson Bridgett, San Francisco
jmoore@hansonbridgett.com

Jean-Pierre van Eijck
Spant Legal, Eindhoven
jvaneijck@spantlegal.com

Co-Chairs, IBA International Construction Projects Committee