By Steve Rizer
When contractors submit their recovery schedules, there is some critical information they should keep in mind, Chris Burke, a partner at Watt, Tieder, Hoffar & Fitzgerald LLP said during “Recovery Schedules -- The Construction Acceleration Hot Potato: Practical and Legal Considerations,” a webinar that WPL Publishing held earlier this month for a target audience of schedulers, contractors, subcontractors, public and private owners, construction managers, consultants, architects, and engineers who are involved in construction project management or administration.
“The importance of a contractor notifying the owner at the time of the recovery-schedule submission is absolutely crucial for the purposes of preserving a contractor’s right to potential acceleration costs that might be incurred if the recovery schedule is accepted, adhered to, and performed,” Burke said.
Burke then presented a hypothetical situation in which a contractor “believes it has entitlement to excusable delay of a certain amount of time, and the owner [wants] the contract [to] be subject to a recovery schedule or a now-compressed remaining schedule in order to meet or closely meet the original contract completion date. On the contractor side, they would be best served to make sure they give specific notice that they are accelerating the remainder of the project where they don’t believe they need to, based on what they believe is entitlement to an excusable delay, and therefore put the owner on notice that the contractor is entitled to acceleration costs.
“Now, sometimes, hopefully, in these kinds of scenarios, you might be able to reach some kind of agreement with the owner that there is some excusable delay entitlement and that the remaining costs of the project on this accelerated schedule can be compensated to the owner, but in the event that that is not an agreement that can be reached at the time of the recovery schedule, it would be advisable to contractors to make sure that they have in there a reservation of their rights.”
Burke and Harris additionally discussed the components of a “good” schedule, schedule updates, notice and changes, the legal importance of a baseline schedule and proper updates, requests for recovery schedules, recovery-schedule development, recovery-schedule resource changes, the cost of recovery time, post submittal, and other topics.
A recording of the 90-minute webinar with slides can be purchased via the following link: http://constructionpronet.com/Products/1016.aspx.
