Legal weapon

Law suits seem to be flying across the process industries sector at present, like arrows in a medieval battle scene.

The biggest battle sees BP suing Transocean, Cameron and Halliburton over who should pick up the estimated $40-billion tab for last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The UK-based oil giant is, of course, itself facing counter law suits from the equipment and services providers on the ill-fated oil rig.

Closer to home, the dispute at the Vivergo biofuels plant being built at the BP Saltend site, near Hull has also descended into a legal free-for-all. Among other issues, Vivergo and Redhall are at loggerheads over who is responsible for employing 430 workers following the termination of Redhall’s contract for falling behind schedule.

Unions GMB and Unite have, meanwhile, threatened court action against these companies, as well as individually against BP, DuPont and British Sugar partners in the Vivergo joint venture.

Some, especially those in the legal profession, would point to the positive aspects of all this. The threat of legal action, plus the many costs and potential damages that go with it, is a strong incentive for all participants to ensure that nothing goes wrong with their work on a project.

On another level, though, the option of hitting the legal ’nuclear’ button can have a very negative impact on relationships between clients, contractors, subcontractors and other parties across a project supply chain.

Adopting an overly legalistic attitude to business relationships can serve to limit the level of communications and openness between companies and prevent them from engaging in a full and constructive way at all stages.

This, in turn, can have serious implications for process safety: as highlighted by the official US report into the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, which identified poor communications and secrecy between BP and its partners as a significant, contributory factor to the tragic accident.