Engineering contracts - Appendix 1: Administrative provisions

The purpose of the administrative provisions is to identify the contractual regime under which the Parties agree to perform the Contract. Consequently, Appendix 1 brings together all the provisions that traditionally fall within the remit of lawyers. It is therefore of particular interest, especially to readers whose background is essentially technical rather than legal. It deserves particular attention for several reasons:

• Firstly, the themes encountered are potentially common to many contracts;

• secondly, the way in which this document has been drafted can be used as a basis for many intellectual services operations. As such, it will serve as a reference document for the presentation of other contracts for the provision of intellectual services encountered by engineering companies;

• Finally, it presents a possible median legal position, based on an analysis of the overall economics of the operation, notwithstanding any necessary adaptation to each project and any possibility of subsequent negotiation that might tip the balance of the document in favor of the project owner or prime contractor.

Insofar as contract negotiation and execution are supposed to be the work of multidisciplinary teams, the proposed commentaries attempt to highlight the points of convergence and divergence usually encountered between lawyers and engineers and, even sometimes, between French and Anglo-American lawyers, so that the concerns of engineers can be understood and anticipated by lawyers and vice versa. The mastery of semantics in the context of understanding basic concepts is of essential importance.