THERE is nothing quite like a major project to spur a subsequent round of litigation.

Take the Queensferry Crossing. Having been opened to great fanfare last September in a ceremony led by the Queen, the £1.35 billion, 1.7 mile-long bridge across the Firth of Forth has been widely hailed as a great feat of engineering, not least because of the difficulty involved in constructing the underwater foundations for its three concrete towers.

For some of the contractors involved in the build, however, the project has resulted in legal action, with a series of contractual disputes involving several parties being filed in the Court of Session.

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In one, SRB Civil Engineering, a joint venture between Irish firms Sisk and Roadbridge, has filed a case against a company called OC314458, which according to Companies House filings was previously known as Gifford.

Both SRB and Gifford – an engineering consultancy that was taken over by Danish firm Ramboll in 2011 – were involved in upgrading the M9 junction leading up to the crossing. Gifford did the design work on that £25.6 million project while SRB carried out the construction work.

While Gifford was voluntarily dissolved after being taken over by Ramboll, last year SRB had it restored to the Companies House register in order to pursue litigation against it.

In a court order handed down in the Central London County Court last May, the court noted that there was “proposed litigation against the [company] for alleged breach of contract and negligence”. A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed that that dispute relates to the work carried out on the M9 junction.

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Ramboll, which did not respond to requests for comment, is also the subject of legal action from the consortium that won the Scottish Government tender to oversee the entire bridge project. Known collectively as Forth Crossing Bridge Constructors (FCBC), the consortium is made up of German firm Hochtief, Spain’s Dragados, US-based American Bridge International and Morrison Construction – the Scottish arm of UK construction company Galliford Try.

FCBC has filed a case against Ramboll, which led the design joint venture for the bridge, as well as against US engineering firm Aecom and UK civil engineering business Tony Gee & Partners.

Aecom was the design checker on the project while Tony Gee’s website said it received a number of commissions from the consortium.

While none of the parties would comment on the cases, a source close to the matters alleged that they are “to do with failings which had an impact on the project”.

The overall terms of the contract between the Scottish Government and FCBC meant that despite the project taking longer to complete than had initially been planned, no financial penalties were incurred by the consortium.

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A spokesman for Transport Scotland confirmed that while so-called liquidated damages can be applied as a form of fine for contractors that fail to meet a project’s deadline, they were not incurred in the Queensferry Crossing project.

“The contractual completion date was 14 June 2017,” he said. “However, in common with the majority of large civil engineering contracts, the contract has a mechanism to change this date in certain prescribed circumstances which are outside the contractors’ control.”

It is understood that the contractors successfully argued that the project overran solely because of adverse weather conditions that could not have reasonably been foreseen.

As the Scottish Government had commissioned the project on a fixed-fee basis, however, the consortium was essentially working for free during the eight months following the original December 2016 completion date and actual completion in August last year.

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It is understood that the consortium has brought the cases against the sub-contractors in a bid to recover some of the losses made over the lifetime of the project.

At this stage it is not clear if any of the disputes will make it to a full trial or whether the parties will prefer to resolve the disputes via other means.

Regardless, the matters are likely to provide plenty of work for the various law firms involved, which include large international outfits with a presence in Scotland.

Glasgow firm BTO Solicitors has been instructed for SRB Civil Engineering in the M9 dispute and Pinsent Masons is acting for the bridge consortium in its three actions.

While it is not known who Ramboll, the company known as OC314458 or Aecom have turned to, Tony Gee & Partners is being represented by Clyde & Co.