An Investigation of Litigation Process in Construction Industry in Turkey

Abstract

Projects are laden with variety of uncertainties depending on their respective characteristics. Construction projects also have their own distinctive characteristics, such as technologies applied and numerous uncertainties Thereby, it is highly probable that disputes could be encountered between concerned parties. While resolving these disputes, unspecialized legal professionals conducting construction related cases would increase the number of unsatisfactory judicial results. In this study, it is aimed to classify the most frequent dispute sources concerning the construction sector and to identify the qualifications and competency levels of concerned judicial actors. Correspondingly, 282 cases between 2007 and 2017 in Turkey are classified regarding relevant contents and analyzed. These cases are extracted from legal websites. While elaborating the cases, content analysis is performed in order to categorize the sources of disputes. Moreover, by inspecting the judgments of Court of Cassation for each case, qualifications and competency levels of judicial actors are questioned. In conclusion, the main dispute sources are classified under 5 headings along with some associated subheadings. Among the subheadings, construction works, construction contracts, debits and credits are detected as the most frequent dispute sources. Secondly, in majority of the cases, reassessment decisions were given by Court of Cassation due to inadequate competency levels of Court of First Instance and expert reports.