FIDIC

FIDIC's contract forms are the closest thing international construction has to a common law. The main forms are keyed by risk allocation, and known by cover colour: the Red Book for construction to the employer's design, the Yellow Book for plant and design-build with contractor design, and the Silver Book for EPC/turnkey delivery with maximum risk on the contractor — with variants and companions around them. Multilateral lenders and cross-border projects reach for FIDIC precisely because both sides' lawyers have seen it before: the machinery of programme, payment, variations, claims and disputes is standardised, tested and translated.

Two features of that machinery do disproportionate work. The contract administrator role — the Engineer in the Red and Yellow Books — determines and certifies between the parties; and the claims regime runs on strict notice: the famous 28-day windows within which a party must notify a claim or, under the default drafting, lose it. Time-bars convert contractual rights into administrative discipline, and they harvest the undisciplined annually.

The standard forms' standard abuse is amendment: particular conditions that quietly rebalance the allocation the form was chosen for, producing a contract that looks like FIDIC and behaves like something else. The form's name reassures; the mark-up governs.