Important COVID-19 Update

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These are certainly challenging times for us all.

We are committed to doing everything we can to prioritise the wellbeing of our people, those who use our services and their representatives and the communities we serve to help contain the spread of COVID-19. Following the Prime Minister’s announcement on Saturday, our people will begin working remotely from today, Monday 23 March.

Having well developed online dispute resolution options, it will in many ways be business as usual for us as we focus on providing a seamless service, regardless of where our Registry staff, adjudicators, arbitrators and mediators are working.

We know you are working through similar challenges to ours and that these are uncertain times for everyone. From all of us here we send our thoughts to you, your teams and families.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance to you and we will keep you informed with any further updates.

EARLY NEUTRAL EVALUATION MODEL CLAUSE

If a dispute has already arisen and there is no agreement between the parties to refer the dispute to Early Neutral Evaluation, the parties may enter into an agreement for those purposes and the following clause is recommended. The words in square brackets should be deleted/completed as appropriate.
 
“[Name of first party] and [Name of second party and Ors] hereinafter referred to as the parties, are parties to [[a contract entered into on or about [enter date]] or [ proceedings in the [ ] Court referred to as CIV- ]].
 
The parties have agreed that all matters in dispute between them shall be referred to Early Neutral Evaluation by [Name of Evaluator] in accordance with the Agreement for Early Neutral Evaluation and Rules for Early Neutral Evaluation of the Building Disputes Tribunal (BDT) which procedures and rules are deemed to be incorporated by reference herein.
 
[if the parties are unable to agree upon the identity of an Evaluator within five (5) working days from the date of this agreement, then the Evaluator shall be appointed by BDT upon the application of any party.]”