By the time you decide to claim, it is decided.

By the time you decide to claim, it is decided

The hard cases are not the ones where somebody instructed a change. Those announce themselves. The hard cases are the ones where nobody instructed anything and the job cost you more anyway.

A drawing arrives four weeks late. Access opens in a sequence that suits the employer's other contractor rather than your piling rig. A third-party approval sits on a desk. Nothing was varied. Nobody did anything obviously wrong. And at the end of the job you are eleven weeks late and several hundred thousand dollars light.

There may well be an entitlement in there. Whether you can use it was settled long before anybody in your commercial team opened a spreadsheet.

What a claim actually has to contain

Start from the finished article and work backwards, because the contract is unusually explicit about what a claim is.

A fully detailed claim has four components. A detailed description of the event or circumstance behind it. A statement of the contractual or other legal basis being relied on. All the contemporary records you are relying on. And detailed particulars of the money or the time being asked for.

Look at where each of those actually gets made. The description is best written while people still remember. The contractual basis can be researched at any time. The records exist or they don't. Only the last one — the quantification — is genuinely a job for the moment you decide to claim.

Three of the four are built during the work. That is what this week is about, and it is why this track stops where it does: preserving an entitlement is a different discipline from pricing one.

There is no ground called “it was their fault”

The second component catches more claims than any other, because it asks a question sites are not in the habit of answering.

Take extension of time. The contract lists the causes that entitle you to more time, and one of them is simply that some other sub-clause of the conditions gives you that entitlement. Which sounds circular until you realise what it means in practice: the entitlement is scattered through the contract, clause by clause, and your job is to name the one that carries your situation.

“The drawings were late” isn't a basis. Sub-clause 1.9 is, together with the notice Week 5 told you to send while the delay was still only likely. “We could not get on site” isn't a basis. Sub-clause 2.1 is, together with the date somebody wrote in the Contract Data. “They kept changing their minds” isn't a basis at all, and turning it into one means going back through six months of correspondence looking for instructions that were never labelled as such — which is exactly the problem Week 6 described.

One useful exception worth carrying: where the delay is caused by a variation, the time effect doesn't have to go through the claims procedure. The variation is its own authority.

Records made at the time, or not at all

The contract defines contemporary records narrowly, and the definition is the whole game. They are records prepared or generated at the same time as the event, or immediately after it. You keep whatever is necessary to substantiate the claim.

That wording rules out the thing most projects actually do. A narrative assembled in month nine describing what happened in month three is a reconstruction. It may be entirely truthful. It is not a contemporary record, and the difference is not pedantry — a reconstruction is one party's account, while a contemporary record is what the site was saying before anybody had a reason to argue.

This is also why the three components divide the way they do. The description can be rewritten. The clause can be looked up. The valuation can be built from cost data that will still be there next year. The records are the only part with a closing date, and it passed while you were busy.

The instruction almost nobody asks for

There is a provision here that repays knowing, and it works in an unexpected direction.

The Engineer may monitor your contemporary records, and may instruct you to keep additional ones. Doing so does not admit the employer's liability, and it does not imply that the Engineer accepts your records are accurate or complete. You have to allow inspection, and provide copies if instructed.

Most contractors read that as an intrusion. It's more useful read the other way. If the Engineer has told you which additional records to keep, you are keeping exactly the records the person who will later determine the matter thinks are relevant. That is worth a great deal, and there's nothing stopping you from asking for that instruction yourself when an event starts.

What belongs to this track, and what does not

It is worth being explicit about the line, because it is easy to blur.

Everything in this track is about whether an entitlement survives: was it notified, is there a clause behind it, do the records exist, did anybody serve the right piece of paper inside the right period. None of that asks how much the entitlement is worth.

Valuing it — forensic delay analysis, concurrency, disruption, productivity loss, the presentation of a quantified claim — is a separate discipline and it gets its own track. The order matters. A brilliantly analysed claim with no notice and no records is an expensive document. A modest claim with both is money.

Practical insight

Pick one event running on your job right now that is costing you and has not been instructed.

Write four headings on one page: what happened, which sub-clause, what records exist, what it is costing. Fill in the first three today and leave the fourth blank. If you can't name a sub-clause, you don't yet have an entitlement — you have a complaint, and the work now is to find the clause or accept that there is not one.

For the records line, be honest about what exists rather than what could be produced. Site diaries that were actually written daily. Allocation sheets somebody signed. Photographs with dates. Emails sent at the time saying the thing was a problem. If the honest answer is that nothing was written down while it was happening, you have learned something more valuable than this particular claim.

Then set up the next one properly. When an event starts — not when it becomes expensive — open a folder, write the clause at the top, and tell the site team what to record. Ask the Engineer whether there are additional records they would like kept.

And keep Schedule Week 22 in view while you do it. That article's whole argument was that the project tells you in month two. This is the contractual version of the same point: month two is also when the entitlement is either being built or being lost.

Key takeaways

✔ A fully detailed claim has four components: the description, the contractual basis, the contemporary records relied on, and the particulars of money and time.

✔ Three of the four are built during the work. Only the quantification genuinely belongs to the moment you decide to claim.

✔ There is no ground called “their fault”. Extension of time entitlement sits in named sub-clauses, and you have to identify the one that carries your situation.

✔ Where delay is caused by a variation, the time effect doesn't have to go through the claims procedure.

✔ Contemporary records are made at the same time as the event or immediately after. A reconstruction assembled later is a different thing, however truthful.

✔ The Engineer may monitor your records and instruct you to keep more, without admitting liability — which makes it an instruction worth inviting.

✔ This track decides whether an entitlement survives. Valuing it is a separate discipline, and it can't rescue a right that was never preserved.

What's coming next

Phase B ends here. Phase C is about time, and it starts with the mechanism this week kept pointing at without opening: extension of time itself. Not the analysis of delay, but the contractual machinery — what the causes actually are, what “to the extent that” does to a claim that has more than one cause, what happens to your entitlement when the delay is partly yours, and why the programme you submitted at the start turns out to matter far more than anybody treated it as mattering at the time.