Engineers and Authority Engineers reject claims for a small number of recurring reasons. Each has a name in the trade, and each is beaten by something done during the works rather than at claim time.
1. Time-bar
The defence: notice was late, so the right is extinguished. Why it works: under FIDIC and many Gulf and Indian forms the notice is a condition precedent, and courts enforce it. The habit: a deadline engine that computes every window from the awareness date in the project's working week, and a rule that the short notice goes out before anyone drafts the argument.
2. Insufficient records
The defence: the contractor cannot prove cause and effect. Why it works: a real delay presented without contemporaneous diaries, photographs, and programme updates loses to a weaker delay that is well documented. The habit: an evidence gap check per event while the event is live, so the site can create the missing records genuinely.
3. Global claim
The defence: the claim lumps every delay together and asks for a total, without linking each cause to each effect. Why it works: tribunals dislike global claims because they shift the burden of disentangling causes onto the employer. The habit: one register entry per event, one narrative paragraph per event, each citing its own evidence, so the claim is never global by construction.
4. Concurrency
The defence: the contractor's own delay ran in the same period, so no extension or at least no cost. Why it works: it is doctrinally contested and often factually true. The habit: flag overlapping events in the register as they occur, so the expert frames concurrency deliberately in the claim rather than discovering it in the rejection.
5. No entitlement basis
The defence: the event is not a ground for extension under the contract as amended. Why it works: Particular Conditions frequently narrow the standard grounds, and a claim citing the standard form is easy to dismiss. The habit: map each event to its contractual ground at logging time, from the extracted and confirmed clause text, not from memory of a previous project.
| Defence | Beaten by | When |
|---|---|---|
| Time-bar | Deadline tracking from awareness date | Day the event is logged |
| Insufficient records | Per-event evidence gap check | While the event is live |
| Global claim | Per-event narrative with citations | Structure of the claim |
| Concurrency | Overlap flagged in the register | As events are logged |
| No entitlement | Event mapped to confirmed clause | At logging, not at claim |
What this means in practice
- Notice first, argument later.
- Gap-check evidence per event while records can still be created.
- Never sum events into one number without cause-by-cause linkage.
- Flag overlaps early; cite the contract as amended.
DraftMyEOT builds each of these habits into the register: awareness-date deadlines, a per-event gap checklist, per-event narratives, overlap warnings, and clause references confirmed from your contract.
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This article is general information about how these contract mechanisms typically work. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for review of your specific contract by a qualified professional.