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Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/1547060
www.canadianlawyermag.com 45 CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTS ARE RISK ALLOCATION DEVICES – AND AI IS CHANGING THE REVIEW Construction contracts seek to allocate risk to each party, and getting that balance right can make the difference between a billion-dollar project's success or failure. That framing sits at the core of how Yonni Fushman leads the legal and risk management function at Bird Construction, one of Canada's largest publicly traded general contractors. A year into his role as executive vice president and chief legal officer, Fushman is navigating an industry at an inflection point – shaped by collaborative contract models, AI-assisted legal review, and an acquisition strategy that keeps landing new businesses on his team's doorstep. "Most of the businesses we acquire have never had an in-house legal function," he says. "So our focus is on demonstrating through every interaction that we're responsive, solution-oriented, and practical." Poorly designed contracts in the industry have sometimes forced contractors to absorb risks outside their control, Fushman says. "It reached an inflection point probably starting five to seven years ago, where the contracting community broadly started to push back." The pushback produced a new generation of models – alliance contracting, integrated project delivery, progressive design-build – each featuring target prices rather than fixed prices and a collab- orative front-end phase that can run up to two years. "It's the adage of measure twice, cut once so that you have a more efficient and effective project execution plan," he says. "We're seeing very large, significant projects now executed without any of that commercial friction." Since joining Bird, Fushman's team has developed a custom tool to quantify systemic risks. "We've done a lot of testing on it, and it's pretty accurate," Fushman says. "It's picking up most of the key issues." On hiring, Fushman's thinking has shifted. "My approach has definitely evolved to hiring the person, not the resume," he says. "Every good hire I've made has been on the basis of fit and aptitude." YONNI FUSHMAN Company: Bird Construction Inc. Title: Executive vice president & chief legal officer