A. In General Whether an owner recovers, absorbs, or becomes liable to the contractor for costs associated with time impacts largely depends upon the specific events causing the time impact and the terms of the contract. Often these issues turn on the existence and language of time-related clauses in the contract, such as a “time is of the essence” clause, time extension clause, force majeure clause, liquidated damages clause, waiver of damages clause, “no damages for delay” clause, acceleration clause and the like. Even though these issues are fact dependent, they can be classified by asking whether the impact is… Read more

An owner typically does not want the contractor to bear all of the risk of differing site conditions because of the owner’s fear that the contractor will inflate its bid or include contingencies in its price to account for the possibility of differing site conditions that may not actually exist. On the other hand, the owner wants to limit its exposure to risk for unknown conditions that, with due diligence, could have been reasonably discovered by the contractor. In theory, by accepting the risk of differing site conditions that could not reasonably be discovered by the contractor’s exercise of due… Read more