What is a rejoinder in Adjudication ?

This article is all about explaining what is a Rejoinder in Construction Adjudication. This term is a key component or step of the Construction Adjudication process. If you want to learn more about Construction Adjudication we have an online course for sale on this website.

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What is a Rejoinder in construction Adjudication

A Rejoinder in Construction Adjudication is simply a response by the responding party to the referring parties reply to their response (bit of a difficult one to get your head around but its actually easy to understand once you list it all out).

This is simply another possible step in the Adjudication process.

There are several steps in adjudication, which we will not go through one-by-one in detail here but just simply list out.

The steps are as follows:

1. Give notice of intention to refer a dispute to adjudication
2. Send application form to the RICS
3. Prepare and send the referral notice
4. Comment on the Other Parties response
5. Deal with the Adjudicator
6. The Decision
7. What happens then?

A Rejoinder is simply the step in between steps 4 and 5 above.  Lets explain it more in the next section.

Rejoinder explained

Once the adjudicator receives the referral document, they will set out an agenda for the adjudication.

The other party will read the referral document and issue a response. This is called ‘the response from the responding party’. This document should follow the same format as ‘the referral document’ and should respond to the issues raised in the referral.

Then you as the referring party have to read their response and issue a reply to their response!! This is called ‘the reply from the referring party’. You should only reply to comments raised in the response. This should not raise new arguments in this reply.

The responding party can then issue another reply which is called ‘the rejoinder from the responding party’ but they must keep their comments strictly limited to what was mentioned in the ‘reply from the referring party’.

So this is what a Rejoinder is

The referring party does have an opportunity to issue another reply called a ‘Sur-Rejoinder’ to respond to any new arguments.

Why so confusing ?

The list of possible actions in Adjudication is as follows

• Give notice of intention to refer a dispute to adjudication
• Send application form to the RICS
• Prepare and send the referral notice
• Responding party issues their reply
• Referring party’s issues reply on the Other Parties response (referring parties reply)
• Responding party can issue Rejoinder
• Referring party can issue Surrejoinder to the Rejoinder

There is a lot of terms with confusingly similar names. Its just the nature of the legal process unfortunately so you just have to get on with it.

Think of it like a game of tennis with the two players hitting back and forth to one another.