FAQs for Quantum

Question 1

What is quantum in a construction claim?

Accepted Answer

Quantum is the money: proving how much the event cost, as opposed to liability, which proves whose fault it was. A claim needs both. Every construction claim splits into two questions: liability, whether something happened that entitles you to more money or time, and quantum, the Latin the industry kept, meaning how much. Quantum is the valuation half: pricing varied work from the contract's own rules, building up the cost of disruption from allocation sheets and outputs, valuing prolongation, the time related cost of being on site longer, and tying every figure to a record that proves it was spent and a cause that links it to the event. It is a different discipline from delay analysis, which sequences programmes to prove time, and the two are often done by different people; my own practice is quantum only. The distinction matters because claims fail on the two halves differently: a claim can win on liability and still collect a fraction of its number because the quantum was assertion rather than build up, and no amount of eloquent narrative rescues an unevidenced figure. When an assessor or adjudicator says the quantum is weak, they mean the money does not prove itself, whatever the merits of the story.

Question 2

What is the difference between a claim and a dispute?

Accepted Answer

A claim is you asserting an entitlement under the contract. It becomes a dispute once the other side rejects it or ignores it, and only disputes can be adjudicated. A claim is a position: you assert, under the contract's own machinery, that you are entitled to money or time, a variation priced, loss and expense, a compensation event. It lives inside the ordinary administration of the job, and most claims are simply assessed, negotiated and absorbed into the account without any formal process. A dispute is what a claim becomes when it is rejected, cut down or met with silence long enough that rejection is the only honest reading; the law calls that crystallisation, and it matters because the formal processes, adjudication first among them, can only decide a dispute that exists. Refer a claim the other side has never actually answered and you invite a jurisdiction argument that the dispute had not crystallised. The distinction also disciplines tone and timing. While something is a claim, the job is evidence and machinery: notices in time, substantiation attached, deadlines pressed. Once it is a dispute, the job becomes positioning: choosing the forum, the scope and the moment. Money is lost by treating a live claim as a war, and more is lost by not noticing the moment a claim quietly became a dispute and the clock started mattering.

Question 3

What records do I need for a loss and expense claim?

Accepted Answer

Two families: documents proving what happened and when, and cost records tying money to those events. The claim is only as strong as the link between them. Loss and expense, the JCT term for the money side of employer caused delay and disruption, is won or lost on two families of records and the thread between them. The cause family proves what happened: notices and applications made in time, instructions and drawing revisions with dates, site diaries and photographs, progress records and minutes that show the event landing on the works. The cost family proves what it cost: allocation sheets putting named operatives against locations and activities, plant and supervision time, invoices, payroll, and the tender build up that sets the baseline the overspend is measured against. The thread is the discipline of keeping them connectable: a diary that names the area affected on the day the revised drawing arrived, an allocation sheet that splits disrupted work from clean work, because the difference between a claim and a grievance is that an assessor can follow a pound from event to invoice. What kills claims is records kept for other purposes: payroll proves people were paid, not where their hours went, and a global overspend proves only that the job went badly, which is the argument the other side wants you to make.

Question 4

Will your involvement be visible to our client?

Accepted Answer

Only if you choose to make it visible. White-label is the default, so your brand sits on the work and confidentiality is agreed in writing. Only if you want it to be: white-label is the default, so the work carries your brand, not mine, and confidentiality is agreed in writing. The valuations, schedules and narrative I produce go out in your templates under your name, I have no contact with your client unless you ask, and the engagement runs between your practice and mine, so the work is yours to present as your own. This suits most claims consultants: your client is buying your judgement, not the resourcing behind it. Some practices do prefer to name me on larger disputes, where a second independent signature on the quantum, the money side of the claim, adds weight if the case is tested; that choice is always yours, engagement by engagement.

Question 5

How do you handle conflicts of interest?

Accepted Answer

By screening every file before I see it. Parties and projects are checked against my other engagements, and I decline where they clash. Checked before I see a file: the parties and the project are screened against my other engagements, and I decline where they clash. A conflict here means I am already acting, or have recently acted, for someone on the other side of your dispute, or on the same project, which would compromise whose interests I serve. Working across several practices only functions if each can trust that their files never inform anyone else's, so the check runs before any papers move, and everything I learn inside an engagement stays inside it on written terms. Where a conflict surfaces mid-engagement, rare but possible on long disputes where new parties appear, I declare it the day it appears rather than managing it quietly, so you can decide how to proceed with the full picture.

Question 6

What do you need from us to start?

Accepted Answer

Four things: the contract, the records, the heads you intend to run and the format the output must land in. A valuation is built from documents, not briefings. The contract, the records, the heads of claim you intend to run, meaning the separate items of money you are pursuing, and the format the output has to land in: quantum, the valuation of what is owed, is built from documents, not briefings. The records matter most, because a valuation is only as strong as the documents behind it: applications for payment, valuations, allocation sheets showing where cost was booked, invoices, timesheets, drawings and correspondence. A ragged file is not a reason to wait, it is itself information; part of the work is telling you early what the records will and will not support, because a figure with no document behind it invites a discount later. So the claim is shaped around the evidence that exists rather than what everyone wishes existed, and you learn the weak points from me, not from the other side.

Question 7

Where do claim valuations usually fail?

Accepted Answer

Almost always on traceability. A figure with no visible route back to a record invites a discount, however sound the entitlement above it. On traceability: figures with no visible route back to a source record invite a discount, however sound the entitlement, the legal right to be paid, sitting above them. The recurring faults are rates asserted rather than sourced from a quote or actual cost, quantities never measured, preliminaries, the time-related site running costs such as supervision and welfare, claimed as a flat percentage instead of a build-up from first principles, the same cost under two heads of claim so it is counted twice, and a single global total that blames every event at once and proves nothing in particular. None are fatal if caught before submission, and all expensive after it, because a decision-maker who catches one soft figure starts doubting the sound ones next to it. The fix is to make every number lead back to a document before the claim goes near the other side.

Question 8

Why can't the claim just be cost minus tender?

Accepted Answer

Because an overspend is not the same as entitlement. The claim has to link each loss to an event the other side owns, not to the job going badly in general. Because overspend on its own is not entitlement: to recover money the claim has to link each loss to a specific event the other side is legally responsible for, not to the job going badly in general. Taking final cost and subtracting the tender price, sometimes called a total cost or global claim, quietly bundles the other side's events in with the claimant's own tender errors, inefficiencies and supply chain problems, and because the single total cannot separate them, the standard defence answers all of it at once by pointing at the claimant's own failings. What survives is the slower, itemised construction: this event caused this effect and these costs, shown from the records, with the claimant's own contribution conceded openly rather than left to be discovered. The headline is usually smaller, but far harder to dismiss, and a recoverable smaller figure beats an eye-catching one that collapses under challenge.

Question 9

How quickly can you pick up a live file?

Accepted Answer

Quickly, once the conflict check is clear and the records land. Adjudication timetables are part of this work, so short notice is normal. Once conflicts are cleared and the records land, I can normally start quickly: adjudication, the fast 28 day dispute process construction contracts must offer, sets tight timetables, and working to short notice is a normal part of this work. The honest constraints are the conflict check, never skipped, my current commitments, which I state plainly before you rely on me, and the state of your records, which governs the pace more than anything I control. What I will not do is take on a deadline that cannot be met properly, because a quantum built to look finished rather than be right costs you far more in the decision than it saved in the diary. If a timetable is too tight to do the figures justice, I say so at the outset so you can plan around it.

Question 10

Do you cover delay analysis as well?

Accepted Answer

No, and that limit is deliberate. I handle quantum only; where a claim needs programme analysis I say so and work alongside whoever provides it. No: I do quantum, the money side of a claim, only, and that limit is deliberate; where a claim needs delay analysis, the separate work of proving how long a project was delayed and why, I say so and work alongside whoever provides it. Money and time are different disciplines, blurred exactly where claims fail: a prolongation head, the claim for the extra cost of being on site longer than planned, is only as strong as the delay analysis underneath it, and a quantum surveyor who improvises the programme side weakens both halves. So on claims with a time element I price the consequences of the delay case your analyst establishes, keep the interfaces clean so the figures and the programme agree, and flag where a money head waits on a time answer before it can be finalised. You get a valuation that rests on proper delay evidence, not a guess dressed up as one.

FAQs for Quantum, Claims & Disputes

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