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The number of construction dispute cases has maintained a high growth trend in recent years. The effective exploration and management of construction contract risk can directly promote the overall performance of the project life cycle. The miss of clauses may result in a failure to match with standard contracts. If the contract, modified by the owner, omits key clauses, potential disputes may lead to contractors paying substantial compensation. Therefore, the identification of construction project contract missing clauses has heavily relied on the manual review technique, which is inefficient and highly restricted by personnel experience. The existing intelligent means only work for the contract query and storage. It is urgent to raise the level of intelligence for contract clause management. Therefore, this paper aims to propose an intelligent method to detect construction project contract missing clauses based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning technology.

A complete classification scheme of contract clauses is designed based on NLP. First, construction contract texts are pre-processed and converted from unstructured natural language into structured digital vector form. Following the initial categorization, a multi-label classification of long text construction contract clauses is designed to preliminary identify whether the clause labels are missing. After the multi-label clause missing detection, the authors implement a clause similarity algorithm by creatively integrating the image detection thought, MatchPyramid model, with BERT to identify missing substantial content in the contract clauses.

1,322 construction project contracts were tested. Results showed that the accuracy of multi-label classification could reach 93%, the accuracy of similarity matching can reach 83%, and the recall rate and F1 mean of both can reach more than 0.7. The experimental results verify the feasibility of intelligently detecting contract risk through the NLP-based method to some extent.

NLP is adept at recognizing textual content and has shown promising results in some contract processing applications. However, the mostly used approaches of its utilization for risk detection in construction contract clauses predominantly are rule-based, which encounter challenges when handling intricate and lengthy engineering contracts. This paper introduces an NLP technique based on deep learning which reduces manual intervention and can autonomously identify and tag types of contractual deficiencies, aligning with the evolving complexities anticipated in future construction contracts. Moreover, this method achieves the recognition of extended contract clause texts. Ultimately, this approach boasts versatility; users simply need to adjust parameters such as segmentation based on language categories to detect omissions in contract clauses of diverse languages.

The purpose of this paper is to examine combinations of contract clauses in order to ascertain which combinations correlate to high operational performance (OP).

Two hypotheses were formulated from contracting theory and tested on data collected from 45 projects. Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis was used and validated with multiple regression and simulation.

The hypotheses were tested to determine whether combinations of classical, relational, and/or associational contract clauses correlate to high OP. The results show that whereas high OP correlates to combinations of relational and associational contract clauses, classical and relational clauses should not be combined.

Directions are proposed to guide future research in order to produce a more nuanced testing of contractual complementarity.

The managerial implications of the findings include a more thorough understanding of the use of contract clauses and of which clauses managers should combine to achieve high OP.

This study contributes to the theory of contractual incompleteness and complementarity, specifically in the context of project contracting. The analysis produced two theoretical implications: first, that better performing contracts are created when combining relational and associational contract clauses; and second, that in projects, relational and classical contract clauses are not complementary with regards to realizing high OP.

Investigates the differences in protocols between arbitral tribunals and courts, with particular emphasis on US, Greek and English law. Gives examples of each country and its way of using the law in specific circumstances, and shows the variations therein. Sums up that arbitration is much the better way to gok as it avoids delays and expenses, plus the vexation/frustration of normal litigation. Concludes that the US and Greek constitutions and common law tradition in England appear to allow involved parties to choose their own judge, who can thus be an arbitrator. Discusses e‐commerce and speculates on this for the future.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the Fédération Internationale des Ingénieurs‐Conseils (FIDIC) White Book standard form of building contract. It tracks the changes to this contract over its four editions, and seeks to identify their underlying causes.

The changes made to the White Book are quantified using a specific type of quantitative content analysis. The amended clauses are then examined to understand the nature of the changes made.

The length of the contract increased by 34 per cent between 1990 and 2006. A large proportion of the overall increase can be attributed to the clauses dealing with “conflict of interest/corruption” and “dispute resolution”. In both instances, the FIDIC drafting committees have responded to international developments to discourage corruption, and to encourage the use of alternative dispute resolution. Between 1998 and 2006, the average length of the sentences increased slightly, raising the question of whether long sentences are easily understood by users of contracts.

Quantification of text appears to be particularly useful for the analysis of documents which are regularly updated because changes can be clearly identified and the length of sentences can be determined, leading to conclusions about the readability of the text. However, caution is needed because changes of great relevance can be made to contract clauses without actually affecting their length.

The paper will be instructive for contract drafters and informative for users of FIDIC's White Book.

Quantifying text has been rarely used regarding standard‐form contracts in the field of construction.

Proposes to treat social law contracts by covering the two most important aspects of the contract of employment, and also the collective agreement. Covers the contract of employment in full with all the integral laws explained as required, including its characteristics, written particulars, sources or regulations, with regard to employers, are also covered. Lengthy coverage of the collective agreement is also included, showing legal as well as moral (!) requirements, also included are cases in law that are covered in depth.

In an article entitled “Collective Bargaining — a theoretical analysis” A. Flanders defined collective bargaining as an “…institution for the joint regulation of labour management and labour markets.” The collective agreement, the result of the collective bargain, is normally an uninforceable contract and is a very different legal notion from that of the contract of employment. The function of the collective agreement is to regulate relations between the collective parties, that is between the employer's association or an individual employer, and a union or unions. Such relations are known as relations of a collective nature. They could include procedure agreements between the collective parties in relation to no‐strikes or other industrial action before the disputes procedure has been exhausted; matters to do with the structure of negotiations between the parties; the constitution of the bodies set up for collective bargaining purposes; procedures on re‐ negotiation of the collective agreement; and so on. The collective agreement has however another function, the individual function, which regulates relations between employer and employee. Terms and conditions of employment are usually regulated by the collective agreement. Thus pay scales, hours of work, holidays, wages during illness, overtime work, any matters relating to training, re‐training, apprenticeship, are some from among the numerous subjects to be found in conditions of employment. Procedures which relate to the individual employee, such as grievance and disciplinary procedures, may equally feature as part of the terms and conditions of employment which emanate from the collective agreement. Indeed statute requires that the employer gives his employee particulars of this latter's major terms and conditions of employment.

This paper considers the impact that contractual procedures have upon the client's control system's ability to deal with unexpected problems. An analysis is made of the relevant procedures set out in the New Engineering Contract (NEC) and a comparison is made to those set out in the Standard Form of Building Contract 1980 Edition (JCT 80). The comparative analysis is based upon a model of problem solving which identifies four critical stages in the problem solving process. The objective of the paper is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of JCT 80 and NEC in relation to the stages of this model. The aim of the paper is to make some recommendations which could be incorporated into future contracts to improve problem solving effectiveness. This work is a continuation of a research project which is considering the communication and behavioural aspects of the problem solving process in construction projects.

The founding principle of contracts is the freedom of the parties. The parties are free to choose their terms and follow any modality of communication, oral or written. As they can freely make a contract, they can freely modify or unmake it. Written contracts have a clause, No Oral Modification Clause (NOM Clause), precluding oral modifications of the contract. Irrespective of it, business persons make oral agreements modifying the contract, and later, dispute its validity. If the parties are free to contract, why should the oral agreement not be binding? In a NOM Clause then, ineffective? The United Kingdom Supreme Court, in MWB Business Exchange Centres Ltd v Rock Advertising Ltd, explores this fundamental question on contract law.

The recent development of legal rules that can invalidate sham clauses or bogus contracts in employment have proven beneficial to workers, in particular those workers that want to be treated as employees. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

This article considers relevant legal decisions from all areas of employment law that have a bearing on this topic.

As will be seen when a court or tribunal has a reasonable suspicion that the clause (or the contract itself) is a sham that is designed, for example, to exclude employee status (to those persons working under a contract with an employer) they may decide to ignore it and treat the contract as a contract of service. The affected worker will then have entitlement to the full range of employment rights available to an employee.

As a consequence of recent legal decisions particularly, those over the last three years an employer that introduces a clause into his contracts (or enters in contractual relations with his workers) needs to ensure that the clause or contract is genuine and operates in practice as it states that it intends to.

If a clause or contract is not genuine and does not operate in practice as it states that it intends to, as the title of this article suggests, there might be serious legal implications for an employer. The clause (usually a substitution clause) or the type of contract entered into must not simply be a device to circumvent the correct application of the law in other words perpetrate a sham.

The legal impact of clauses or type of contract entered into is analysed fully for the first time in this paper.