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 Inc., 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.
Fushman spent nearly 18 years at Aecon Group Inc. before joining Northland Power Inc. as chief legal and administrative officer. When the opportunity at Bird came up, the pull was immediate. “I’ve always had tremendous respect for the people at Bird, many of whom I’ve known for two decades,” he says. “They’ve positioned the company to deliver solutions to meet Canada’s needs from coast to coast to coast now and well into the future.” The company operates nationally, with offices in Mississauga, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Regina, Vancouver, and other key locations.
Integrating acquired companies
Fushman has been involved with many acquisitions in the sector, and Bird was completing the acquisition of Fraser River Pile & Dredge when he joined. “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.” That means responding quickly, understanding each business on its own terms, and creating an experience that is “bespoke and business sensitive” – different from what many of those teams may have experienced with external counsel, where the sense of not being the highest priority can be pervasive.
The evolution of construction contracts
The central preoccupation of Fushman’s group is the construction contract itself. “A construction contract, which is a lot of what a legal group will see, is really just a risk allocation device,” he says. The history of the sector is largely a story of how those devices have evolved, and Fushman has watched the full arc of that evolution from inside the infrastructure development and construction industry for more than two decades.
The classic design-bid-build model had owners procuring complete designs before tendering on a fixed-price basis. In practice, designs often proved incomplete or unbuildable, and owners found themselves mediating disputes between contractors and designers. Design-build resolved that structural problem by having contractors own the design relationship directly. P3s, or public-private partnerships, went further, bundling design, build, financing, and operations within consortium frameworks for projects worth $1 billion to $5 billion – requiring contractors to absorb risks such as municipal approvals, permitting, and system commissioning that were entirely outside their control. “It reached an inflection point probably starting five to seven years ago, where the contracting community broadly started to push back,” Fushman says.
The pushback produced a new generation of models – alliance contracting, integrated project delivery, progressive design-build – each featuring target prices rather than fixed prices, contractor cost reimbursement, and a collaborative front-end phase that can run up to two years. If contractors, owners, and designers work through a design together before breaking ground, they surface problems before they become change orders. “It’s the adage of measure twice, cut once so that you have a more efficient and effective project execution plan,” he says.
The results are concrete. P3 projects once required their own on-site legal departments of up to five lawyers to handle the volume of disputes and change documentation generated by those models. Under collaborative frameworks, that overhead disappears. “We’re seeing very large, significant projects now executed without any of that commercial friction,” Fushman says. Today, Bird’s in-house legal team manages a contract portfolio spanning everything from standard Canadian Construction Documents Committee form agreements to bespoke multi-billion-dollar contracts.
Technology and legal operations
Since joining Bird, Fushman’s team has developed a custom tool to quantify systemic risks. “We developed an in-house tool to quantify systemic risks, which means those risks that go to the very nature of the project, such as overall complexity or quality of the design, but they’re not easily quantified in traditional risk registers,” he says. Without reliable numbers for those factors, the outcome is often zero-sum: the owner overpays, or the contractor undercharges.
The team has also trained AI agents for issue-spotting. On large, complex contracts, those agents generate a multi-minute overview to orient the full legal review before lawyers spend hours on it. For smaller, lower-value contracts that might not otherwise receive full legal attention, the agents run the exercise independently and flag concerns with an AI disclaimer. “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.” The aim is to keep lawyers focused where it counts: “It helps keep the lawyers focused on strategic priorities… which is where we want them to be.”
Building the team
The legal and risk management group has approximately 15 lawyers organized into three teams: public company work, front-end contract negotiation, and disputes. Fushman has introduced a cross-training framework that creates deliberate opportunities for lawyers to shadow colleagues outside their specialization. “We’re being more deliberate about it, just to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to see everything across the business,” he says.
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.” Bird applies the "Ideal Team Player" hiring framework, which prizes three qualities: humble, hungry, and smart. Candidates who fit that profile may not be ready to take work off colleagues’ desks immediately, and that demands discipline from leadership. “That’s the role of leadership in these situations,” Fushman says – “just to keep the eye on the long-term value of the culture of the team.”
Yonni Fushman is a member of the Canadian Lawyer Leaders Network.