Most claims fail but the contractor is often right. The problem is they cannot prove it in the way the contract requires.

Let’s start with basics. A claim in construction is a formal request made under a contract asking for extra time, extra money, or both because something happened that was not part of the original deal.

There are over 20 claim types (we’ll explore them in a future post), but the most common ones include:

• Scope/design changes

• Late approvals / failure to approve

• Late information / revised drawings / incomplete design

• Access, possession, and interference by others

• Unforeseen ground conditions

• Suspension or restricted access

• Acceleration

Claims exist because construction is unpredictable. No project goes exactly as planned. Claims are the contractual mechanism built into contracts to deal with that reality. Contractors are “generally” entitled to extra time and money when disruptions outside their control affect the work. “Generally” because entitlement always depends on what your specific contract says.

So how do you actually recover what you’re owed? There are four steps.

Step 1: Know your scope. You can’t identify what changed if you don’t know what was agreed in the first place. This means understanding your contract documents inside and out: the drawings, specifications, schedules, and conditions. Most contractors know their technical scope well. Fewer know their contractual rights and obligations with the same depth. That gap is expensive.

Step 2: Recognize scope changes as they happen. Changes don’t announce themselves. They hide in RFIs, revised drawings, meeting minutes, and casual instructions from the engineer. If you’re not actively watching for the signals in your daily correspondence and documents, you’ll miss claims you’re entitled to.

Step 3: Send notice on time. Most contracts require written notice within a strict window, often 28 days or less from when you became aware of the event. Miss the deadline, and many contracts say you forfeit your entitlement entirely. It doesn’t matter how legitimate your claim is. Late notice can kill it before it starts.

Step 4: Submit a defensible, substantiated claim. A successful claim requires more than showing that something happened - it requires tying cause to effect, running time and cost impact analysis, linking impact to contract entitlement, and presenting it in a form that can withstand scrutiny. Most project teams don’t have the time or expertise to do this well while also running the job.

That fourth step is where claims live or die. They die because it requires significant effort to prove the entitlement or contractors don’t have enough evidence. There’s a framework that separates the claims that get paid from the ones that get rejected. It’s called CEES.

• Cause

• Effect

• Entitlement

• Substantiation

The CEES Framework

This framework has been used by claims consultants for decades, and the Institute of Construction Claims Practitioners treats it as foundational knowledge. After reviewing dozens of claim submissions, I can tell you that claims which follow CEES succeed. Claims that don’t, fail.

Cause is the event that gave rise to your claim. You’d be surprised how many claims bury the actual triggering event in pages of background narrative. The cause needs to be stated clearly and early. Was it late access to site? A revised drawing? An instruction to suspend work? Delays caused by another contractor the employer hired? Whatever happened, state it plainly and date it precisely.

Effect is the demonstration of how the cause actually impacted you, whether in time, money, or both. Did the late access push back critical path activities? Did the design change require rework that extended your schedule by three weeks?

The connection between cause and effect isn’t self-evident. You must prove that the event caused the delay and additional costs you’re claiming. This typically requires a time impact and quantum analysis. Why? Because construction activities often run in parallel. If the disrupting event didn’t affect the critical path, you’re not entitled to an extension of time.

Entitlement answers: does your contract actually give you the right to recover? It’s not enough that something bad happened and it cost you money. You need to tie the event to the contract and show that you’re owed compensation under these circumstances.

Under FIDIC Sub-Clause 8.4, for example, you’re entitled to time extensions for delays caused by the employer’s other contractors on site. But entitlement often comes with conditions precedent, like notice windows.

Substantiation is the evidence that holds everything else together. Every statement you make about cause, effect, and entitlement needs to be backed by project records. Daily reports, meeting minutes, letters, photos, approved programs. If you can’t point to a document, you can’t prove it happened.

One claims consultant I respect put it bluntly: he’s rejected submissions that were nothing more than a few pages and a “haphazard, dog-eared collection of documents” expecting the reviewer to sort through and connect the dots themselves. That’s not how this works. The burden of proof is on the claimant.

What if it didn’t have to be this hard?

For decades, the only way to build a CEES-compliant claim was brute force: teams of people manually combing through thousands of documents, reconstructing timelines event by event, and hoping nothing slipped through the cracks.

But what if there was a way to trace cause to effect automatically? What if every letter, drawing revision, and meeting minute could be linked to the events and impacts they relate to -not after months of forensic effort, but in real time?

What if the evidence trail built itself?

The technology to do this now exists. And it’s about to change how construction claims are won.

If this resonates, we’d love to talk!