Commercial and Contract Disputes
Not every dispute that stalls a project involves a community. Operators fall out with the contractors who build for them, the suppliers who equip them, the counterparties who lift their product and the partners who fund them. We mediate those, on referral from the lawyers already running them.
Where these disputes come from
A project runs on a stack of contracts, and each of them is a relationship that can fail. Four patterns recur in the sectors we work in.
- Operator and contractor — construction, engineering, drilling and civils. Defects, delay, variations, disputed claims and termination, where the work is half-built and both sides still need each other to finish it.
- Operator and supplier — equipment and consumables that fail in service. Warranty, fitness for purpose and lost production, often with a third supplier joined and causation argued in every direction.
- Offtake and trading counterparties — failure to lift or deliver, quality and specification disputes, pricing mechanisms and force majeure, under contracts that run for years after the argument.
- Joint venture and project partners — co-venturers, farm-in parties and shareholders in the same asset. Funding, deadlock, operatorship and the decisions no one can make alone.
What they share is that the counterparty is commercial, sophisticated and usually insured, and that the parties expect to go on doing business with each other long after the file closes. That is the fact a judgment cannot accommodate.
Why they are hard to settle
Not because anyone is unreasonable. Because the measure of a good offer is what happens if you refuse it, and in a technical dispute nobody can price that until the evidence is in. Parties guess, and they guess in their own favour. Litigants are reliably too optimistic about trial and too vague about the cost of getting there — the years, the discovery, the senior operations people off site for months.
Add a third party and it compounds. Bargaining from positions is slow between two; with three it needs coalitions, and a position several people have signed up to is far harder to move than one. Expert evidence often makes it worse before it makes it better: each side ends up with enough support to hold its position and enough contradiction to make the outcome genuinely unpredictable.
How we mediate them
The first decision is when, not what. A mediation convened before the expert evidence has been exchanged asks parties to settle a question none of them can yet price. Convened after, the same uncertainty becomes concrete enough that each party, and each insurer, can finally put a number against losing.
From there the work is structural. Where a negotiation will not move, we count the decisions being asked of it — a three-party matter settling both what the claim is worth and how two defendants divide it between them is two decisions on one critical path, and lifting the second off usually leaves the only one the claimant actually needs. Numbers come from standards both sides accept rather than from leverage, so parties can move without anyone appearing to back down. Everyone attends with authority to settle and their insurer in the room, because a standard nobody can act on that day is just another meeting.
The same six stages, read for commercial parties
This work runs on the Social Licence Resolution framework, with two stages read differently. There is no stakeholder side of the table here, so stage 02 is private session with each party rather than work done on the community’s ground; and stage 03 routinely convenes three parties or more, not two.
Set out the legal framework
Anchor every party in what happens if talks fail — here, the judgment or award each would be left holding, and what it costs to get there.
Listen
Private session with each party before anyone shares a room. The commercial interest underneath a claim is rarely the one that was pleaded.
Convene
All parties in a shared room — three or more where co-defendants have been joined — under ground rules that neutralise the adversarial frame.
Reframe
Positions become interests; interests become options; the unwinnable argument becomes a shared problem.
Negotiate
Principled negotiation anchored in objective criteria, with each option tested against the courtroom alternative.
Document
Heads of agreement signed before anyone leaves the building where it can be, then a deed that binds every party to it.
For the lawyers running the file
Most of this work comes by referral from the firms already on the record. Equipoise is engaged as the mediator, not as anyone’s representative, and the retainer stays where it is — we take no part in the proceedings before or after. Craig Morris leads these matters: Magic Circle–trained at Clifford Chance, later Ashurst and HFW, with twenty-five years of commercial litigation, construction and engineering disputes and international arbitration behind him.
Where the dispute is with a landholder, a community, a regulator or a Native Title party rather than a commercial counterparty, that is social licence resolution — different work, same framework.
If your situation warrants a conversation.
Everything you share is confidential and goes directly to Nick, the principal. Equipoise takes a small number of matters each year — billed hourly to scope the matter, then a single fixed fee once its complexity is clear.