Contract Interpretation Issues Dominate Two New U.S. Court of Federal Claim Cases
In two recent decisions, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims engaged in some heavy duty contract interpretation -- focusing primarily on what constitutes a patent ambiguity in plans which bidders are required to bring to the owner's attention before submitting bids.
In this case, the contractor was disallowed any extra costs because the Court concluded that the specifications were clear. Just to give you some indication of how closely the Court parsed the language, a key part of the ruling was based on the absence of a comma in a particular sentence (which the Court took to mean that the final clause "as indicated in the drawings" modified only the noun immediately prior to this subordinate clause not the entire sentence).
This case ended more happily for the contractor when the Court ruled that the distortion of the standing seam metal roof (which the contractor was to provide under a performance specification) was actually caused by flaws in the owner-furnished design specification for the building structure.
