Resolution Management Consultants has built a three decade career untangling commercial construction disputes after they’ve already turned into litigation. Its newest guidance argues most of those fights were preventable, if the contract had actually been written for the specific project rather than copied from the last one.
A Marlton Firm Has Spent 30 Years Watching Construction Contracts Fail the Same Way. Here’s What They’re Telling Clients to Do Differently.
Resolution Management Consultants, the Marlton based construction advisory firm known throughout the industry for untangling disputes after they have already escalated into litigation, has released new guidance aimed at stopping those fights before they ever start. The firm’s latest report outlines specific measures for reducing or eliminating the kind of contractual disputes that erupt from unforeseen circumstances, the sudden material shortages, unexpected site conditions, and supply chain disruptions that have become an increasingly routine feature of large scale construction projects.
Why “Unforeseen Circumstances” Keeps Ending Up in Court
The report’s core argument centers on a genuinely simple observation with outsized consequences. Language addressing unforeseen circumstances in a construction contract requires case by case analysis to determine cause and effect, which makes it one of the more difficult contract provisions to draft in a way that actually holds up once a real dispute emerges. Rather than treating that difficulty as a reason to fall back on generic legal language, RMC’s guidance argues it should be treated as exactly the opposite, a reason to invest real time upfront negotiating provisions built around a specific project’s actual, foreseeable regional risks.
Stop Copying and Pasting the Same Clause
Most construction contract failures trace back to lawyers reusing standard boilerplate language for unforeseen circumstances rather than tailoring it to the project at hand. RMC’s guidance calls for a genuine deep dive at the outset of any project, negotiating preemptive solutions to regional issues, whether that means known supply chain vulnerabilities, local labor market conditions, or site specific risks, before any party signs the final agreement.
Bring in an Objective Third Party Before Ground Breaks
The report recommends hiring an independent risk assessor before construction begins rather than waiting until a dispute is already underway. Because most projects share predictable bottlenecks, an outside reviewer with a genuinely global view of the industry can flag supply chain or labor friction points that an owner or contractor, too close to their own project, might simply not see coming.
Build One Shared, Transparent Communication Channel
Rather than relying on closed door executive meetings or fragmented email chains, RMC recommends establishing a single, inclusive communication network looping in every project participant, from the developer down to the on site subcontractor. When everyone is working from the same shared data, unexpected delays can generally be resolved through direct collaboration rather than escalating into an adversarial legal fight.
A Firm Built Specifically Around This Exact Problem
Resolution Management Consultants was founded in 1993 by veterans of the construction contracting and engineering professions, and has spent more than three decades assisting private owners, public agencies, and contractors either in achieving their original project goals or in resolving cost and time disputes once those goals have already broken down. The firm’s staff brings direct experience across the full construction lifecycle, engineering, construction management, and accounting, along with more than 30 years of specialized work in critical path method scheduling and formal claims analysis, the kind of technical, day by day project tracking that often becomes the deciding evidence once a dispute actually reaches arbitration or litigation.
Headquartered in Marlton, RMC has expanded its practice nationally over the years, maintaining additional offices in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, giving the firm direct, on the ground familiarity with regional construction conditions across multiple major markets rather than a single generalized national playbook. That range of experience spans a genuinely wide set of project types, commercial construction, detention facilities, education, healthcare, hospitality, industrial, transportation, and marine and bridge work among them.
Prevention Over Litigation
What ties RMC’s newest guidance together is a genuinely straightforward premise, that the firm’s own decades of experience resolving disputes after the fact has left it with a clear, repeatable sense of exactly where those disputes actually originate. Rather than continuing to treat contract disputes purely as a legal problem to be litigated once they surface, the firm is pushing owners, contractors, and developers to treat dispute prevention as a genuine project management discipline in its own right, one that starts well before a single shovel ever breaks ground.
