61 documents matter. They are somewhere in 14,800.
A SAR 8.4m claim is not won from the contract. It is won from a chronology assembled out of site minutes, programmes, certificates and email — none of which was filed by anybody who expected a dispute.
- 14,800
- documents on the project
- 61
- relevant — 0.4%
- 19 months
- the chronology spans
- 96h → 22h
- to assemble it
Extension of time and associated preliminaries
Six documents carry the claim. Two of them are against you, and a chronology that omits those is not a chronology.
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Month 2
Instruction to vary the substructure, issued verbally and confirmed by email
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Month 3
Contractor's notice of delay — served late by four days
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Month 5
Site minutes recording the engineer's acceptance of the delay in principle
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Month 9
Revised programme issued and never formally rejected
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Month 14
Payment certificate omitting the preliminaries with no stated reason
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Month 19
Rejection letter relying on the late notice
The late notice at month three is the strongest document the other side has, and it surfaced in the same pass as everything else. A tool that only assembles helpful documents produces a claim that collapses the first time it is tested.
What a project set is like
Worse than a data room in every respect except one: it is all yours, so nothing was curated before you saw it.
- Mixed languages, mixed quality
- Site paper is bilingual, photographed rather than scanned, and often handwritten. Pages that cannot be read are listed rather than dropped.
- Dates are the whole case
- Every document has to carry when it was issued, received and acknowledged — three dates that frequently disagree.
- Notices have their own clock
- Most construction claims turn on whether a notice was served in time, which is a derived date rather than a diary entry.
- Variations are amendments
- A variation order changes the contract. Treating them as correspondence is why the operative terms and the executed contract stop matching.