All open and above board

I read with interest Liam Holder’s letter (4 April, page 38) suggesting that my article on SGS vs Barratt (14 March, page 70) breached some kind of “assumed” confidentiality.

Although I acknowledge the general assumption is that adjudication is private and notionally confidential, I have yet to see any law that applies the doctrine of confidentiality to adjudication (as it does to arbitration). If there is any such law, perhaps Mr Holder would point me in its direction.

In fact, the temporarily binding nature of adjudication creates the situation where much more is known about a particular adjudication than Liam Holder suggests.

The adjudication was brought to the attention of the press by SGS and commented on by Barratt. It was the parties that placed it in the public domain and any failure to maintain this notion of confidentiality was by the parties themselves and not by me.