Control Focus in Standard Forms: An Assessment through Text Mining and NLP

Abstract

Construction projects are prone to disputes that are predominately caused by the failure of parties to keep their contractual obligations, and, if not resolved, may spiral into complex legal issues that may take years to resolve. Contracts, which are expected to allocate the obligations to parties in a balanced manner, are often claimed to be focused on controlling one party by putting maximum obligations on it. The present study aims to quantitatively understand and compare the extent of control focus in various standard forms of contracts. To this end, text mining and natural language processing (NLP) techniques are used to analyze 12 standard Indian and international forms, and instances of client and contractor obligation distribution are compared. The results demonstrate that generally the international standard forms are less control focused then their Indian counterparts. Further, a majority of the standard forms have evolved with more control focus over time. The findings of this study are expected to open up the concept of measuring the quality of drafting of standard forms with an objective to make contracts less prone to costly arbitrations and litigations.