Presentation - Construction Claims and Responses: Effective Writing and Presentation - page 42

no familiarity with the project. If the issue progresses to a dispute, then
it is even more likely that the people called on to become involved in the
issue will have little or no prior knowledge of the project or the circum-
stances and events leading to the claim. For this reason, in addition to
the claim or review document being of a stand-alone nature in terms of
the contents and supporting documentation, it is also important to compile
the narrative and prepare the submission so as to include all information
that someone with absolutely no prior information may fully understand
the issue. It may seem unnecessary to include, for example, a project
description or the names of the parties in the narrative, but fi rstly, this has
to be done only once for it to be cut and pasted into subsequent docu-
ments and secondly, this information will be important, if not essential, to
an arbitrator or suchlike. A side benefi t, in presenting claim documents in
such a way, is that the claimant is in effect intimating that he is confi dent
in his case and if the reviewer does not agree, then the claimant already
has a comprehensive claim submission ready and waiting to take to the
next level.
The Importance of Leading the Reviewer to a Logical Conclusion
Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end and the same
is true of a claim or review narrative. The purpose of the narrative is to
fi rstly set the scene by explaining the background of the project and the
general circumstances; this could be regarded as the beginning. The
middle of the story is where the action takes place and in the case of a
claim narrative, this is where we explain the events that have occurred
and discuss cause, effect and entitlement. If the narrative author has done
a good job, this will in turn lead to an ending which will be a logical conclu-
sion in which the entitlement and quantum is summarised. As in all good
novels, if this premise is adhered to, the heroes will hopefully live happily
ever after.
In the case of a claim review, the reviewer may be somewhat con-
strained in achieving this, if he decides to follow the same order of pres-
entation of a claim that is not presented in a very logical manner. The
reviewer needs to decide whether his purposes will be served better by
following the order of the claimant's presentation or, if he feels this would
be more logical, by responding in his own way.
Use of the Narrative to Explain Other Documents
It is often very obvious that a claim-submission document has been pre-
pared by more than one person. In such instances the fi nal result is usually
somewhat disjointed and there is little interrelationship between the sepa-
rate parts of the submission. Possibly, one person has been responsible
for the narrative, someone else has prepared programmes to demonstrate