The necessity of exploring new alternatives on dispute resolutions in the Mexican Construction Industry Juan Pablo Sandoval, Mexico. Juan Pablo Sandoval gained his law degree from Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, obtaining the “San Ignacio de Loyola Medal”, as well as the “Excellency Award” for the score he obtained in the National Official Test. He has a post-graduate degree in arbitration from the Escuela Libre de Derecho and the ICC. He has a wide range of experience in litigation and arbitration in both sectors, national and international and has participated in international web panels organized by the Asociación Latinoamericana del Derecho de la Construcción (ALDEC) – the Latin American Association for Construction Law. Juan Pablo is a key member of the dispute resolution team in COMAD, S.C, a law firm specialized in construction law. It is known that construction projects are subject to several conflicts between the parties in a contract. Thus derived, for example, from different points of view on the costs (who absorbs certain costs, who is responsible for some other costs, is it applicable to request the reimbursement of specific costs); on the interpretation of the parties’ obligations, or even differences in decisions like whether to go or not to a conciliation process before, or instead of arbitration or a judicial action. In Mexico, those problems are seen every day, with unnecessary delays on construction projects and increased costs. The issue is that even when such problems are well known, there are few economic solutions for resolution and the parties still end up in arbitration or judicial trials, which ultimately are likely to result in greater costs for construction projects. For instance, in Mexico the solution proposed is to draft one contract per project and many companies prefer to perform/design its own model of contract for each project. The main issue with this practice is that when that model of contract has one defect, that defect will appear in each subsequent project that uses the same model of contract. Now, lets imagine that the “infected” clause is the one correspondent to the dispute resolution mechanism. The defect in the whole contracts will be a “pathological clause”, which can make it difficult to proceed appropriately on how to claim any concept to the other party. The situation does not end there. For example, if there is a public project you need to sign a contract with and authority (administrative contract) in which the particular person or company which result awarded in the tender process will act as “contractor” and the government (authority) will act as the owner. The authority is entitled to the “principle of legality” which consists in that the authority can just act in accordance to what is strictly established in the applicable law. Thus, the general rule for administrative contracts is to agree that the competent authority to resolve any dispute generated by the interpretation or execution of the administrative contract, will be the Federal Tribunal for Administrative Justice.
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