Eat your heart out, J-Lo

My wife has been following – with some wry amusement, it has to be said – the unfolding on-off saga of Hollywood golden couple, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. It seems that, when Ben popped the question, La Lopez's first misty-eyed reaction was to have her lawyers draw up a pre-nuptial agreement outlining terrifying consequences in the event of his so much as looking at another pert bottom.

I was still chuckling about this when I arrived at a client's office a little while ago to discuss the detail of a project we'd just won – only to be confronted with a pre-appointment document so thick and so obtusely worded that it would have taken a month to read and understand it properly. Suddenly, the notion of a pre-nuptial agreement didn't seem quite so amusing any more. "Don't worry about that," said my client, waving a hand casually at the document. "It's just our new standard agreement." The trouble is that I do worry because I know that the "standard" agreement will not have been written with my own best interests at heart.

It's getting to the stage in our industry where litigation is no longer seen as a last resort – to be used only after every sensible avenue of resolution has proved unsuccessful – but is actually becoming a standard way of doing business. If some small detail goes awry, you don't get a call from the site foreman; you get a letter from the lawyers. At a time when the industry is supposed to be removing confrontation, this seems a particularly backward step.

Now, some of my best friends are lawyers, and when I put this argument to them they become, not unnaturally, a trifle defensive. "All we're doing," they say, "is protecting our clients' best interests." Which is quite right, of course. Except that lawyers are trained to look for problems and conflicts. Ask them to examine a completed project and they won't focus on whether you've done a good job; they'll focus on whether you used the specified number and type of fixing bolts (in case they can catch you out and save their client a few quid). The question is whether this is really in their clients' interest – or in their own.

I agree that it's sensible to protect your position. However, I also think it's a mistake to place so much emphasis, so early, on legal confrontation – and I think it's a mistake that it is widely encouraged by the legal profession. Just flick through the pages of this magazine and you'll find four separate columns written every week by legal experts on aspects of construction law. The implication is clear: our business is fraught with legal complications that we can't hope to understand without their help.

If some detail goes awry, you don’t get a call from the site foreman; you get a letter from the lawyer

Yet this seems to be a recent phenomenon – so what's changed in the past few years? Has our business become much more complex and litigious or are we just more willing to believe that, in order to protect ourselves, we must leave everything in the hands of the lawyers? Call me cynical but, at several hundred pounds an hour, that's hardly a belief our legal friends are likely to discourage.

Of course, I'm not so naive that I think we should all do business on a nod and a handshake. However, we should encourage agreements that are couched in clear, uncomplicated terms and that do exactly what they say: define what it is the two parties are agreeing about, not what one of the parties is subsequently going to disagree about.

Another of our big clients has a much more relaxed approach to agreements. They're sharp on detail, make no mistake about it, but they focus on the positives of what they expect us to do and they put those expectations in clear, everyday language in a document that runs to a few pages. The result is that both sides know exactly where they stand and we don't waste weeks (and vast amounts of fees) shuttling backwards and forwards between the lawyers.