Asked what a claim costs, most people think of professional fees. Those are real, and they are the easiest figure to establish in advance. They are also, on almost every dispute we see, the smaller half of the picture. An initial dispute review exists partly to put the whole cost on the table before the commitment is made.
The other half is made up of things that do not arrive as an invoice: the senior time the dispute absorbs, the money that stays unpaid while it runs, and the exposure you take on if the case turns out to be weaker than it looked. None of those appear in a budget, and all of them are felt.
Management time is the largest hidden cost
A claim is assembled from documents that only your own people can find and explain. Somebody has to pull the records, remember the sequence, check what was actually instructed and respond to questions. That somebody is normally the most experienced commercial person you have, and they are not doing their other work while they do it.
The cost compounds on a live project. Attention taken from the current account, the current programme and the current subcontract package has a habit of producing the next problem. Disputes are rarely isolated events in a business that is stretched.
This is also why claims that are allowed to drift cost far more than claims that are dealt with. A dispute that stays open for a year consumes attention for a year, in small amounts that never get counted.
Money that sits still has a cost
While a sum is in dispute it is not funding anything. For a contractor that shows up as working capital tied into a scheme that has finished. For a developer it can hold up the closing of a project, a refinancing or a sale.
Whether interest or finance charges can be recovered depends on the contract and on the circumstances, and it is not something to assume. What is certain is that the money is unavailable while the argument runs, and that cost falls on whoever is waiting for it.
The exposure in a weak claim
A claim that fails does not simply return you to where you started. It can leave you carrying the other side’s position as well as your own, and it tells the other side something about how you assess your own case, which affects every negotiation after it.
This is the cost that an early review is designed to prevent. Establishing that the entitlement is not there is an unwelcome answer, but it is an answer that costs a fraction of discovering the same thing after the position has been stated formally.
What influences the professional cost
Three things drive it. The volume of documents, because somebody has to read them. The state of the records, because reconstructing a sequence from incomplete material takes far longer than reading a clean one. And the number of separate issues, because each one is effectively its own small case.
Fees are agreed individually based on the nature, complexity and scope of the matter. What makes the figure predictable is defining the scope first: a review of one payment cycle is a different piece of work from an assessment of a two year account, and saying which one you are buying prevents the work expanding while it runs.
Scope is also where a narrow instruction beats a wide one. The claims and dispute services are deliberately separate pieces of work for that reason: a payment cycle, a retention balance and a disputed account are different questions, and buying all three when you only have one is how a review becomes disproportionate.
The cost of the dispute you do not settle
There is a cost on the other side of the ledger that rarely gets counted. An account left open ties up the people who would otherwise be closing other accounts, and it keeps a commercial relationship in a state where neither party can plan around the other.
For businesses that work repeatedly with the same contractors, consultants or clients, that matters more than the sum in question. A dispute that is resolved, even unfavourably, releases attention. One that sits unresolved consumes it indefinitely.
Who carries the cost inside your business
On paper the claim sits with the commercial team. In practice it lands on whoever knows the project best, and that person is usually also the one holding the next three jobs together. The cost is therefore concentrated rather than spread, and it falls on the person least able to absorb it.
Bringing somebody in from outside does not remove that entirely, because the project knowledge still has to come from your people. What it changes is the proportion: a few structured conversations and a document request, rather than weeks of assembling, writing and arguing.
That is worth stating plainly when the decision is taken, because the alternative assumption, that the claim will be absorbed into existing workload at no cost, is the one that quietly damages the rest of the portfolio.
Setting the cost against what is at stake
The decision is a commercial one and it has a simple shape. What is the realistic recovery, not the aspirational one. What will it cost in fees, time and delay to pursue it. How likely is it to succeed on the documents that exist.
Where the answer is marginal, there are usually narrower options. A single issue can often be tested on its own, or an account can be reviewed for the two or three items that carry most of the value. Running everything because everything is annoying is how claims become disproportionate to what they recover.
The cheapest version of all is the one where the records were good enough during the works that the position was never seriously in doubt. That is commercial management rather than claims work, and it is the only part of this that pays for itself before anything goes wrong.
Not sure whether the claim is worth running?
An initial dispute review reads the contract and the correspondence, tests whether an entitlement exists and tells you what the dispute is likely to absorb before you commit to it.