Appointment of Adjudicator - when adjudicator is named in Contract

If there is a named adjudicator on a main contract, would he be required to act even if he has already acted in a 1st adjudication in which the subcontractor was successful?
Would the MC still have to approach him formally and ask him to act once again giving notice of the request to the subcontractor? Or would it be in order for the MC to email him and inform him he had already appointed from another body?

1 Like

If an adjudicator is named in the contract then that adjudicator must be approached first in accordance with W2.1(1). Whether he has acted before is immaterial save where his previous invovlement may give rise to concerns over impartiality. Those concerns do however need to be real and detailed advice should be taken on that point.

Each appointment is unique and should be started in the same formal way. The adjudicator can always decline to act.

Many thanks Rob - this has been bugging me since 2010 after we were successful in a first adjudication we referred. We then put in a final account showing an item that was in our referral that the adjudicator had not addressed at all and another item with some further info, plus all the items agreed by the adjudicator in the previous, so the matters raised were substantially the same as in the previous. This was to show a cumulative figure. The MC then referred the whole thing back to adjudication to adjudication, emailed the named adjudicator and told him that this had come up again. He did not tell him who was the referrer or referee, and said he had already appointed from another body and some other comments that I won’t write on here. I requested the formal request from our solicitor over and over again and had a reservation put on the jurisdiction of the new one. I was advised very strongly by our solicitor to remove the reservation as they would simply choose another one and took his advice. I believe this advice was wrong and I eventually got the email between the referring company and the named adjudicator. The new adjudicator overturned most of the decisions made in the previous adjudication, the referring company put in exactly the same paperwork as in the previous and we lost our company as we could not afford to pay. I have suspected something was very wrong here, all too late of course for our previous company. I appears our only mistake was to call our application a Final Account.