Lord Justice Coulson last month delivered a seminal lecture to the Society of Construction Law on the topic of delay claims. The most senior construction judge in England and Wales explained that the orthodox view on so-called “time at large” among contractors, engineers, lawyers, experts, adjudicators, arbitrators and judges may not actually be correct. I will here first explain what he said about the misconception of time at large and then set out the practical implications of this seminal lecture.

It is important to note that although the judge was careful to say that his comments were not to be taken as any indication of how a particular case would be decided in the future the practical reality is that practitioners, clients and experts will of course, now, employ the judge’s analysis and look at time at large in a fundamentally different way. 

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