Know who will answer a claim before it lands
Before your account goes in, decide who will answer a counterclaim if one comes back, and make sure they will be free when it lands. A defence nobody has time to build leaves their figure standing, however weak it is.
Updated: . By Jack Butler-Kettle, Construction Claims Consultant.
Why it matters
A claim against you comes with a short window to answer it, and an adjudication can leave you only days. Meanwhile the account goes in and the team moves on. Three weeks later the counterclaim lands: 60 pages of allegations and a short deadline. The person who knows the job is on another site, with the records on their laptop. Whoever is free has to rebuild the job before answering a single line. Part of the claim then gets conceded, not because it is right, but because nobody has the hours to show it is wrong. Deciding in advance who will answer decides the outcome more often than the arithmetic does.
How to do it
- Write down who holds the records and figures for each part of the job, and where they are kept, before your account or claim goes in.
- Work out when a response or counterclaim is likely, and how long you will have to answer it under the subcontract or the adjudication rules.
- Check that the people named will be free in that window, and book their time now.
- Arrange cover before the account goes in if they will not be free.
- Keep the working papers and records in a shared folder, so someone else can pick them up without the author.
Example
Illustrative example. The scenario and figures are invented.
The facts
A subcontractor is about to submit a £520,000 final account, built by one surveyor over 8 weeks. That surveyor moves to another site a fortnight later. The main contractor has already written twice about defects and delay, and a counterclaim looks likely within a month.
What happens
- The commercial lead asks who will hold the records if a counterclaim lands, and finds the answer is nobody.
- The surveyor's working papers and the site records go into the shared job folder, with a one-page index of what sits under each part of the account.
- A second surveyor is booked for the likely response window, and walked through the account and the records before it goes in.
- The counterclaim lands at £140,000 with 60 points on defects and delay. The second surveyor answers them from the indexed papers.
The outcome
The answer goes in on time, with every point answered from the records, and the counterclaim settles at £35,000. Without the cover, the answer would have been whatever concession the main contractor proposed.
To have this set up for you, see our Counterclaim Prevention service.