Key takeaways
- Interim adjudication compresses a dispute into weeks, so the evidence has to exist before the notice is served.
- Prompt payment notices of non-payment create a paper trail that later delay and disruption claims live or die on.
- Lien and holdback timelines run independently of the commercial negotiation, and they do not pause for goodwill.
A faster dispute, not a smaller one
The prompt payment and adjudication regime under Ontario's Construction Act did not reduce the complexity of construction disputes. It reduced the time available to present them. An adjudication runs on a timetable measured in weeks, with a determination that binds on an interim basis and has to be honoured.
That shift rewards parties who maintain their records continuously and penalises those who assemble a claim after the relationship breaks down.
What the compressed timetable demands
By the time a notice of adjudication is served, the analysis needs to be substantially complete. In practice that means a small number of things must already be in place.
- A maintained, statused schedule with an accepted baseline and a clean update history
- A notice register showing what was served, when, and under which clause
- Contemporaneous cost records that separate the disputed scope from base scope
- A chronology of the disputed events built from the project record rather than from memory
- A clear statement of the relief sought, with the arithmetic traceable to source documents
Notices of non-payment as evidence
Prompt payment obliges a payer who disputes an invoice to say so, in writing, with reasons, within a fixed period. Those notices become some of the most useful documents in a later delay or disruption claim, because they record what each party said the problem was at the time.
We treat the notice trail as primary evidence. Where a payer's stated reasons shift over time, that shift is itself informative; where they stayed consistent, the claim has to meet them squarely.
Supporting counsel on a short clock
Where volumes are large, we narrow the corpus first: normalise and deduplicate the records, extract the entities and dates, and build the chronology before anyone starts reading for meaning. That is what makes a defensible expert position achievable inside an adjudication timetable.
Counsel still decides the legal argument. Our role is to make sure the factual and quantitative foundation under it is complete, reconciled and traceable.
Written by Elite Analytics Claims Practice. For advice on a specific project or claim, get in touch.
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