Fostering Collaboration: Dispute Prevention Strategies in Construction Industry

By anticipating project pain points and discussing ahead of time parties can prevent most disputes from happening and facilitate successful project delivery

Rob McManamy

Oct. 1, 2025

4 min read

Key Highlights

The construction industry is highly litigious, with disputes often arising from design changes, delays, and accidents under tight deadlines
Proactive dispute prevention methods aim to resolve issues before they begin and potentially damage professional relationships
Jim Groton advocates for addressing problems as they occur to prevent escalation into full-blown disputes, emphasizing fairness and good faith among parties

Planning meeting with the US Army Corps of Engineers.

[Editor's Note: this article originally appeared in HPAC Engineering.]

It's no secret that our industry is still considered one of the most litigious of all the business arenas. The pressurized mix of design changes, competing trades schedules, materials deliveries, weather delays, worker shortages, accidents, etc., all under tight deadlines, has long kept lawyers at full employment in and around engineering and construction.

When I was in law school 35 years ago, the joke then about our industry was that "every project has three phases: design, construction... and litigation."

But one thing that remains lesser known since then is that this industry also has been one of the most proactive and forward-thinking about alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods. From arbitration to mediation to med-arb to project neutrals to dispute review boards to partnering, etc., many attorneys representing engineers, architects, contractors, subcontractors and owners, both public and private, have been striving for decades to find a better way to ensure that inevitable disagreements do not derail projects and destroy relationships.

Cover of Preventing the Dispute by Jim Groton.

One such construction attorney is my longtime friend, Jim Groton, 97, a retired partner at the Atlanta law firm of Eversheds Sutherland and perhaps the AEC industry's best-known and most respected evangelist for dispute prevention and ADR. With that in mind, Jim earlier this year sent me a copy of the latest book he had just co-authored for the American Bar Association (ABA), entitled Preventing The Dispute Before It Begins: Proven Mechanisms for Fostering Better Business Relationships.

Since the 1960s, Groton and others in the ABA construction bar have been pushing for a better way to foster non-adversarial relationships across project teams. By anticipating project pain points and discussing ahead of time how they can and should be dealt with when they arrive, the parties can prevent most disputes from happening and facilitate successful project delivery, he says. The book offers several key tools to help make that a reality.

In an online interview (below) from 2021 with future co-author Allen Waxman, then CEO of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR), Groton explained, "I'm in favor of getting into problems at the moment they come up, and not letting them ever escalate into disputes with a capital 'D'... Dispute prevention means not just keeping people out of litigation, or out of arbitration, or out of mediation. It's keeping them out of Disputes that involve lawyers, adversarial relationships, arguments, etc."

In short, it's all about preserving the relationships between good faith parties, including the project owner, so that they can all work together again down the road, if they so desire.

"There are ADR mechanisms to avoid litigation and set up a dispute resolution process; these include arbitration and mediation," says Carlos Hernandez, former CEO of engineering giant Fluor Corp., as quoted in the book. "But we should begin the dispute prevention process before we get to those stages. The processes should focus from the inception on the contractual relationship. We'll all benefit from putting in place means to solve disagreements before they become full-fledged disputes."

With that in mind, Hernandez urges all industry stakeholders to adopt the new CPR Dispute Prevention Pledge for Business Relationships. To read the pledge and see why firms like Microsoft, Visa, and General Motors have signed on, go to: https://www.cpradr.org/dispute-prevention-pledge-for-business-relationships.

For Groton, as complicated as many of the massive construction projects are that he has worked on over the last 60 years, one simple lesson from childhood has always stuck with him about how parties should treat each other. "Long ago, as a schoolboy in boarding school, each table would be served pie after dinner every Saturday," he told Waxman with a smile. "But the boy chosen to slice the pie could only keep the last piece for himself. So he had to be fair to everyone else along the way."

That’s a credo that still applies well beyond the dinner table today.