The other week I had a great conversation with a claims specialist in Montreal. He has spent more than a decade witnessing, defending, and building construction claims, so I asked him what he sees most often when a client walks through his door.
His answer: they come to him too late. Not too late to file a claim, but too late to prove one. By the time most clients show up, the dispute is already months old, and the discipline that would have made the claim easy to substantiate never existed in the first place.
As an expert, his job is to revisit every detail of a project and reconstruct exactly what happened, when it happened, and what it cost. But when daily reports are filled out on a bi-weekly basis, the project manager can no longer recall the exact date a milestone was completed. When the schedule stopped tracking the reality of the project months ago, there is nothing reliable to measure an impact against. Then he asked me the question that stuck with me.
If your own expert cannot piece together what happened from your records, how do you expect an outsider, let alone a judge, to be convinced there is entitlement?
The problem is rarely entitlement. It is proof
Most clients who bring a dispute to a specialist are right about the underlying events. Something did go wrong, and it did cost them money. What they are missing is not a case. It is the substantiation. The industry data says the same thing.
Read those together and the lesson is uncomfortable but simple: the disputes that drag on for a year and cost tens of millions usually do not fail on the merits. They fail on the record.
The evidence expires while nobody is looking
Part of what makes this hard is that the cause and the damage rarely show up at the same time. An RFI raised today can sit quietly for months, absorbed by float, until a later change consumes that float and the original event surfaces as a critical-path slip. By then the notice window has closed, the people involved have moved on to other problems, and the details live only in memory, the same memory that could not recall the milestone date for the bi-weekly report.
So the moment when documenting an issue is cheap and the moment when you desperately need that documentation are separated by months. That is why waiting until a dispute emerges to get disciplined never works. The record you need already had to exist.
The unglamorous fix
Here is the part I find most interesting. One of the indirect benefits our clients see from deploying Storia has nothing to do with claims at all. It is that the platform shines a light on what could be done better during the project. Simple things.
The habits that build the claim
- Tagging locations to RFIs.
- Filling out the daily report on the day it describes.
- Tracking the impact of directives and change orders as they land, not after they pile up.
Written down, it sounds almost silly. None of it is sophisticated. But it needs to get done, consistently, by people who are already stretched thin. That consistency is exactly what separates a claim that gets paid from one that gets argued for twelve months.
It made me think about how project managers compare to other professions. A lawyer's file is disciplined by default; the workflow demands it. Project management might be one of the least standardised professional jobs there is: every PM has their own way of logging, filing, and following up, and most of it lives in habits rather than process. That is the gap we are trying to close. Not by adding paperwork, but by making the diligent version of the job the easy version.
Claims are built before they are written
The claims specialist in Montreal was not complaining about his clients. He was describing a pattern: entitlement is common, proof is rare, and proof is built in the boring weeks when nothing seems to be going wrong. The best claim is the one your records have already made, and the best dispute is the one that settles quickly because the other side can see you kept score all along.
Sources
The industry figures cited above are drawn from the reports below. Storia's product descriptions are our own.
- Arcadis, 15th Annual Global Construction Disputes Report (2025)Source of the US$60.1M average dispute value, the 12.5-month average resolution time in North America, and the finding that poorly drafted, incomplete, and unsubstantiated claims are the leading cause of construction disputes.arcadis.com, global construction disputes report →
- CMAA, The State of Construction Disputes in 2025Corroborating North American analysis of dispute causes and the role of early intervention and notice in preventing escalation.cmaanet.org →
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