Valeur.Scope sets the price, and your file sets the scope.
Scope sets the price, and your file sets the scope. This page writes down what sets the scope, under four headings, in a form you can check against your own contract. The figure follows once those four have been talked through, and it comes in writing.
The form runs in five steps; two fields are required. The rest can be left empty, and what is left empty is covered in the first conversation.
One figure would assume the same product does the same work on every file.
How much is at stake moves from contract to contract. The sector’s own measurement reports it as a share of the contract sum rather than as a fixed amount.
On contracts that went into dispute, the sums in dispute averaged 33.4% of the contract budget.
HKA, CRUX Insight — 8th Annual Report, 2025. More than 2,200 projects, 114 countries. Denominator caveat: this pool is made of projects that experienced a dispute, not of all projects — it cannot be read as “a third of every contract”.
That is what the sector publishes; Valeur makes no claim to shrink it. What follows is what sets the size of an engagement: where you sit in the contract chain, what scale the file is at, and which heading gets opened first. Those are the three things the form asks — the smallest amount of information a price can be discussed from. No outcome, no saving and no payback period is written on this page; we do not credit ourselves with what we have not measured.
The top box is not our measurement; the bottom one is not a result. The line between them is drawn thicker here than anywhere else on the site, because there is a form below it: a finding about how much money is at stake, placed above a send button, is one careless sentence away from reading as a promise that we reduce it.
The same product is a week’s work on one file and a quarter’s on another.
Four things. The form asks three of them. The fourth is the one it leaves out, and we learn it by looking, in conversation — because it is not a question a checkbox gets an honest answer to.
Where you sit in the contract chain
A main contractor, an employer, a subcontractor and an adviser look at the same contract from four different places: who carries the notice obligation, whose record counts as evidence, who runs the clock against whom. The setup follows from that position, and so do the clause groups that get read first.
The scale of the file
The contract sum alone is not the workload, but what comes with it is: how many packages, how many subcontracts, how many separate certificate cycles, how many languages the correspondence is in. The band in the form asks those as one question rather than four — a crude proxy, and the crudeness is deliberate.
Which heading comes first
A pre-signature load test, notice windows, dispute readiness, liquidated damages and retention tracking, supply risk — these do not all start at once. Which one is opened first sets the shape of the initial setup; the rest arrive on top of it.
The state of the paperwork today
Is the contract a searchable file or a photograph of signed pages; do the appendices sit in one place; is the correspondence in one mailbox or spread across four people. The form leaves this one out. It is not a question a checkbox gets an honest answer to, and a guessed answer is the worst thing a price can be built on; we find it out by looking, in the first conversation.
These four are not a pricing formula. They are a way of writing down in advance what a conversation will cover — so the first half hour is not spent telling us what you already know.
Five steps, two required fields.
Your answers go to the company’s contact address as a single email. The more you fill in, the shorter the first conversation; but filling in the two required fields and sending is enough.
Five questions about the price conversation
Why don’t you print a price here?
Because a number given before the scope is seen is not a price. The same product means four different setups for four companies looking at the contract from four different places, and the workload is not the same at the two ends of the bands. Print one figure and it looks expensive for the small file and cheap for the large one; both readings are wrong. The figure that follows a scope conversation comes in writing.
What exactly does the form send?
The fields you filled in and nothing else: side, band, the headings you ticked, name, email, company, title, phone, country, project type. All of it goes to the company’s contact address as a single email. How long those fields are kept, and who has access to them, is set out in the privacy notice.
What actually happens in the conversation?
We look at one of your contracts together. Where you sit in the contract chain, the scale of the file and which heading gets opened first are already on the form; what the conversation looks at is the fourth one — the state of the paperwork today. At the end of it the scope is written down, and the figure is written on top of that scope.
Can I write to you instead of using the form?
Yes. The address in the site’s contact section goes to the same inbox. The form only shortens the first conversation: it saves us asking the same three things at the start of it.
Do I have to fill in all five steps?
No. Two fields are required: the email and the name. There is also the consent box, which has to be ticked before anything is sent, so that consent is not counted as given by someone who has not read what is processed and why. Everything else can be left empty, and what is left empty gets asked in the first half hour of the conversation.