Construction

Business & Civil Litigation

Everyone on the project has a different contract, and they do not match.

An owner has an agreement with a general contractor. The general contractor has subcontracts with trades. The trades have suppliers. Each document has its own scope, schedule, payment terms and dispute provisions, and the gaps between them are where the money is lost. Reading the whole chain — not just your own contract — is how these cases are analysed.

What we handle

The disputes that recur

• Change orders performed on a verbal instruction. The work is done, the contract required written authorisation, and the contractor is arguing waiver instead of getting paid.
• Retainage withheld long after completion, which Texas regulates and which is recoverable.
• Delay and acceleration, where the schedule analysis decides who owes whom.
• Defect claims requiring expert evidence about the standard of care and the cost of repair, not just photographs of something that looks wrong.
• Pay-if-paid and pay-when-paid clauses pushing an owner's failure to pay down onto subcontractors.
• Residential work, where the Residential Construction Liability Act imposes notice and inspection requirements before an owner can sue.

The complaints behind most construction files

• Delays and missed deadlines, and who caused them.
• Substandard workmanship, measured against the plans, the specifications and the applicable standard.
• Failure to pay for labour or materials actually supplied.
• Violations of warranties or of the specifications the parties agreed.
• False billing and inflated invoices, including work certified as complete that was not.

Most of these resolve through negotiated settlements and payment resolutions rather than a trial, and they resolve faster when the file is organised enough to show the other side what a courtroom would see.

Documentation is the case

Daily reports, photographs with dates, requests for information, written change order requests even when nobody signed them, delivery tickets, payment applications and the emails around them. The party with the contemporaneous record usually wins, and the party reconstructing events from memory a year later usually does not.

Common questions