The Preliminaries to the Claim - Construction Claims and Responses: Effective Writing and Presentation - page 90

The parties should also be introduced at this stage and their roles and
responsibilities under or outside the Contract explained. In addition to the
Employer and the Contractor, this would typically include the Engineer,
the designer and the cost consultant.
The next issue to deal with at this stage is the Contract itself, with a
brief outline of the conditions. Is this a standard form of contract such as
FIDIC? If so, the particular form, edition and date should be stated. If the
conditions are based upon a standard form with separate conditions of
particular application, this should also be noted here. Possibly it is the
Employer's own bespoke contract and, in such a case, a brief explanation
should be included here. In some areas, particularly in the case of inter-
national contracts, the applicable law may not be that of the country where
the project is located and, in such circumstances, it is a good idea to clarify
the applicable law at this point.
If the Contract is based upon a standard form of contract and conditions
of particular application, care must be taken to be aware of, and to take
into account, any amendments to the standard clauses that have been
made within the conditions of particular application. I was once obliged to
reject a contractor's claim entirely, because the contractor had not taken
the trouble to study the conditions of particular application which affected
the whole basis of his claim. A good way to ensure that such errors cannot
be made is to make a working copy of the contract document in which the
particular conditions are consolidated into the standard form. If a soft copy
of the standard form is available, this may be fairly easily accomplished
by the use of the usual computer programs. Otherwise, copies of the
particular conditions may be manually cut and pasted (and by manually,
I mean with scissors and glue), either over the standard clause, or onto
the facing page of the standard conditions. If this task is completed at the
commencement of the project, I can assure you that as well as reducing
the possibility of errors, it will save much time and frustration by the avoid-
ance of having to leaf through two separate documents and to try and
mentally consolidate the clauses.
Certain key details from the Contract will also be useful to the reviewer
for background information, so it is necessary to extract those from the
Contract and summarise them here. Such details would typically include:
1. The Tender Date.
2. The Contract Sum.
3. Dates of Commencement and Completion.
4. Milestone dates.
It could be the case that the Contractor has been awarded previous
extensions of time and additional payment and, in such cases, it would be
appropriate to include a brief description of these in order that the reviewer
may be apprised of the fact that the completion date and the contract sum
have already been changed from those stated in the Contract.
We have discussed, in Chapter 4, the fact that one of the four essential
elements of a successful claim is to establish the claimant's entitlement
under the Contract. To achieve this, it is necessary to make reference to