CEO PANEL DISCUSSION held, everybody felt comfortable with the lien remedy. They wanted to maintain it. Because of that consultation, we had to make adjudication fit with the existing lien remedy.” When Ackerley pressed the other panelists to offer a description of what adjudication will look like in practice, Glaholt was the first to step up to the plate. “Number one, it’ll be almost all documents only,” he said. “The idea of having a hearing with recorders and transcripts and lawyers phoning you at 11:00 at night about the next day’s cross examination… for almost all disputes, that’s going to be over. You meet the adjudicators in the U.K. and see how they do it, and it’s on a documents-only basis.” Adjudication will also put renewed emphasis on contract administration, Glaholt said. “People don’t administer their contracts well, and therefore they end up in my office. This group, in this audience, will now become better at contract administration. You’ll observe your contracts, the writing will become consistent, and it will be docu- ments only.” Importantly, Glaholt said, adjudication is an interim process and the parties lose nothing by it. He likened the process to having a dispute with the Canada Revenue Agency: the taxpayer is entitled to dispute the amount of tax they have to pay, but they have to pay that amount first and seek redress later. “I’ve talked to judges in the U.K., and they say they let the process take its direction because people don’t lose their rights,” Glaholt said. “If somebody doesn’t like the adjudicated result and they want to overturn it because they don’t agree with it, they can immediately go to the divisional court and say, ‘I was cheated, there was fraud.’ That’s built into the statute. Or they can put a lien on it, and down the line, if they feel inclined to do it, they can have a lien act or an arbitration. It preserves all that.” That point may be especially important in the early going because the panelists noted that it will take a while to build a pool of qualified adjudicators in the province. Glaholt acknowledged that there’s going to be “uneven quality” in adjudication for a while, but that the experience of other jurisdictions suggests the situation will sort itself out. What will be required to perform the role of adjudicator still isn’t well understood. One big misconception is that those with legal training will make the best adjudicators. “The qualifica- tion of adjudicators has nothing to do with your profession, your background or your training,” Glaholt said. “It has to do with the statutory requirement to make a reasoned, written determination. You undertake as an adjudicator that you’ll take the documents, you’ll craft a process and you’ll give a reasoned award. You have to be able to choose among things that actually are reasons to make an award, and you have to look at the people that have provided you with this material and be sure they feel they’ve had a fair shake.” Many of the professions represented in the audience will be drawn from to fill the ranks of adjudicators, Reynolds added. “If you’re a senior architect with deep project experience, or an engineer, or a contractor, or a very senior surety underwriter, and you have the respect of the parties and they’ve chosen you to come up with an interim binding solu- tion, then that’s fine,” he said. NOSMASHANDGRAB Glaholt added that some people have found out how to game the adjudication process in other jurisdictions, and that the made-in-Ontario solution has been crafted with a view to preventing the same from happening here. In the U.K., for example, so-called “smash and grab” adjudications have