Why construction projects lose claims they should win

Ask any commercial manager who has been through adjudication and they will tell you the same thing: the claims that fail are rarely the ones without merit. They are the ones where the merit could not be demonstrated.

The delay happened. The instruction was given. The information arrived late. Everyone on the project knows it. But two years later, when the submission is being prepared, the correspondence is spread across four personal inboxes, the site records stop for the three weeks the document controller was on leave, and the meeting where the instruction was actually given was minuted in a Word file that nobody can find.

What adjudicators actually look for

The test is not whether a reasonable person would agree that the delay occurred. It is whether the contemporaneous record — the documents created at the time, for their own purposes, rather than assembled afterwards for the claim — supports the position being advanced.

That distinction matters enormously. A schedule of events prepared during the claim carries almost no weight. A dated letter issued within the notice period, referencing the drawing revision in force and the activity it affected, carries a great deal.

Where the record usually breaks

In our experience there are four common failure points, and none of them are about competence:

• Notices issued late or not at all. Time-barred notices under FIDIC and NEC are missed because nobody had time, not because nobody knew the clause existed.
• Email outside the register. The decision that mattered was agreed in a reply-all thread that never made it onto the project record.
• Progress recorded as a percentage. “68% complete” cannot be interrogated. Installation dates by floor and zone can.
• Events not linked to activities. A variation register and a programme that never reference each other leave the causal chain to be argued rather than shown.

Building the record while it still costs nothing

The uncomfortable truth is that the work required to win a claim is almost entirely work that should be happening anyway. Issuing notices on time is contract administration. Recording installation dates is progress reporting. Capturing correspondence against the project rather than the individual is basic document control.

What changes when these are done in a connected system rather than in parallel spreadsheets is that the links between them survive. The instruction references the variation, the variation references the affected activity, the activity shows the variance against baseline. Nobody has to reconstruct that chain later because it was never broken.

A practical test

Pick any event on your current project from three months ago — a late approval, an instructed change, an access restriction. Ask how long it would take to assemble: the notice, the response, the affected activities, the cost impact and the supporting site records.

If the answer is more than an hour, the record is not doing its job. If the answer is “we would have to ask a few people”, the claim is already weaker than the entitlement.