This article explains how project owners can avoid the disappointment they routinely experience on their construction projects, by relying less on tightly drafted contractual obligations and instead using the law of self-interest to get their supply chain to deliver their desired outcomes.

Infralegal recently organised an IPFA event that explored the potential to combine private finance with collaborative contracting based on a hypothetical project—a new Sydney Metro line to the Northern Beaches! This article provides an overview of the perspectives of each key player.

Rumour has it that the Queensland Government will use the Delivery Partner Model to deliver venues required for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games. But will it deliver, and what do companies wishing to participate in the construction activities need to know?

The need for consensus decisions within an alliance creates the risk of deadlocks when consensus cannot be achieved. To resolve such deadlocks, many alliances have a deadlock-breaking mechanism, but the success of these is questionable.

This article considers how the adoption of an independent chairperson on the ALT could provide an alternative best-practice governance model for an alliance.

This article considers whether legal concerns that an obligation to act in good faith will cut across other contractual powers and give the other party a ‘get out of jail card’. It concludes that such concerns are overblown, and that businesses stand to gain more than they will lose by embracing an obligation to act in good faith.

Article recommending the Defence embraces strategic collaboration/enterprise contracts and DABs to achieve capability acquisition reforms contemplated by Strategic Defence Review.

To build the trust needed for a two-page contract, we need win:win commercial arrangements that align self-interest.

Strategic collaboration contracts are taking off, based on Infralegal’s recent engagements.

To the uninitiated, Project Alliance Agreements are ‘strange animals’. This article provides some pointers on what contractors, designers and other non-owner participants should consider before entering into a Project Alliance Agreement (or other collaborative or relational forms of contract that incorporate features from the project alliance model).

This new quasi-alliance contractual arrangement turned a failing rail project into a successful, on-schedule, below budget procurement of additional trains.

The delivery partner model is in its early years and it remains to be seen whether the model will gain broad acceptance in Australia. That said, it seems well suited to major infrastructure projects where the client wishes to achieve time and cost outcomes that can't be achieved via traditional procurement models and is prepared to embrace and manage integration risks, with the assistance of capable delivery partners.

This report explains how strategic collaboration contracts could be used by the Australian construction sector to continuously improve construction outcomes, by breaking the cycle of lost learning, reducing the sector’s excessive reliance on competitive tendering and leveraging the prospect of further work to attract productivity-enhancing investments by suppliers.

The construction industry has suffered from poor productivity growth for decades. The problem is not unique to Australia – it is a global phenomenon. A lift in construction productivity could have a massive impact on our ability to meet our infrastructure needs.

This article looks closely at the NEC4 Alliance Contract and compares it with the current alliance contracts utilised in Australia.

Collaborative contracting is more than a response to an overheated construction market, a health pandemic or inadequate competition for mega projects. It is a mechanism that can overcome the inherently adversarial nature of conventional contracting, and unlock significant productivity improvements that would enable the industry to deliver more infrastructure for less.

The article we contributed to the 11th edition of the Projects and Construction Review