Investigation on Particular Contractual Issues in Construction

Construction Disputes and Associated Contractual Knowledge Discovery Using Unstructured Text-Heavy Data: Legal Cases in the United Kingdom

“…Case law, which plays a critical role in legal reasoning and decision making, is the corpus of decisions on cases that judges have made [17]. As every legal judgement is made on the basis of contractual evidence [18], contract conditions that are cited in the legal judgement can be useful to understand potential risk factors. In other words, frequently appearing contract conditions in legal cases can be critical contract terms that should be carefully reviewed at the contract level because courts seem to rely on contract interpretation whenever disputes result in litigation [18,19].…”

“…As every legal judgement is made on the basis of contractual evidence [18], contract conditions that are cited in the legal judgement can be useful to understand potential risk factors. In other words, frequently appearing contract conditions in legal cases can be critical contract terms that should be carefully reviewed at the contract level because courts seem to rely on contract interpretation whenever disputes result in litigation [18,19]. Therefore, by examining construction legal cases focusing on contract terms and provisions, there is the potential to obtain meaningful contractual knowledge that can provide a better understanding of avoiding uncertainties, reducing future disputes.…”

“…Prior works on construction legal cases including [18,[20][21][22] have mainly focused on manual content analysis of construction cases and review of specific reports that identified the disputes. Since large-scale manual analysis of text and content is time-consuming, error prone, and subject to data bias, little research exists on exploring large amounts of case laws.…”