The moment before escalation is the last cheap moment in a dispute. After it, positions are formal, timetables start running and the cost of changing your mind rises sharply. The questions below are the ones an initial dispute review answers, and they are worth answering whether or not anybody outside your business is involved.
None of them is about whether you are right in principle. Being right in principle is the most common reason claims are run and one of the least reliable predictors of how they end.
One. Does the contract give you a route
Something going wrong is not the same as a right to be paid for it. The contract lists the events that carry an entitlement, and the list is narrower than most people expect. The question is not whether the situation was unfair but whether it falls inside one of those provisions.
This is the question people skip, because the answer feels obvious from the inside. The project was disrupted, the disruption was somebody else’s doing, therefore somebody else should pay. That reasoning is natural and it is not how the contract works, which is why claims built on it tend to collapse at the first serious examination.
Amendments matter here more than the standard form does. A contract that has been amended will often have moved, narrowed or removed exactly the provision you are relying on, and the amendment schedule is the first thing worth reading rather than the last.
Two. Was the notice served, and in time
Many contracts make a notice a condition of recovery. Where they do, a late notice or no notice can defeat a claim that would otherwise have been sound, and no amount of merit afterwards repairs it.
Check what was actually sent, to whom, by what means and on what date, rather than what everybody remembers sending. Notices that were discussed in a meeting, mentioned in a progress report or implied in an email chain often turn out not to satisfy what the contract required.
Where the contract names a recipient and a method, both matter. A notice sent to the right person by the wrong route, or to the wrong person by the right route, is a weaker starting point than one sent as the contract describes, and this is the kind of detail that is cheap to establish now and expensive to discover later.
Three. Do the records prove it
A claim is only worth what can be shown. Site records, allocation sheets, measurements, programme updates and correspondence are what turn an account of events into an evidenced position.
Records made at the time carry weight that reconstructions do not. A daily sheet completed on site in the week it happened says something that a schedule assembled eighteen months later from memory and invoices cannot, however accurate the later document turns out to be.
The honest version of this question is uncomfortable: if somebody hostile read your records without your explanation, what would they conclude. Where the answer is that they would not follow it, the gap is the problem to solve before anything is escalated, not after.
Gaps are not always fatal. What matters is knowing which ones exist, because a claim built around a weakness you have identified behaves very differently from one built around a weakness the other side identifies for you.
Four. What is it actually worth
The figure in the first letter is rarely the figure that survives. Work out the realistic value: the items that are properly supported, valued by the method the contract sets rather than the one that suits the claim.
Set that against the cost of pursuing it. A sum that looks significant before fees, management time and delay can look very different afterwards, and that comparison is the whole decision.
It is also worth separating the claim into its parts. Most disputes contain two or three items that carry the bulk of the value and a long tail that carries very little. Running the tail because it is part of the same argument is how claims become expensive without becoming more valuable.
Five. Which route fits
Negotiation, mediation and adjudication are different instruments with different costs, timetables and consequences. Adjudication in particular runs to a tight timetable once it starts, and the time to prepare is before the notice rather than after it.
The route also depends on the relationship. Where there is more work to come, a route that preserves the relationship may be worth more than the maximum recovery on this account. Where the relationship has already ended, that consideration disappears and the calculation is simpler.
If the answers point to adjudication, the preparation that follows is adjudication support, and it benefits from having started before the notice was served.
Answering them honestly is the hard part
The questions are not difficult. Answering them about your own project is, because by the time anybody asks them a view has usually formed, and the instinct is to look for support for that view rather than to test it.
The common failure is treating a weak answer as a presentational problem. If the notice was late, the answer is not a better explanation of why it was late. If the records do not show what you need them to show, the answer is not a more confident narrative. Those are substantive problems and they behave like substantive problems when somebody independent reads them.
The whole exercise is cheaper when the underlying commercial management was sound in the first place: change valued as it happened, notices served as the contract required, records kept because they would be needed. That is cost control and variations work during the project, and it is what makes these five questions easy to answer rather than uncomfortable.
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.