Valeur.You are not the one who signs the contract. You are the one who lives in it.
A contracts manager’s week is built of dates, not clauses. An event happens on site, the account of it reaches you two days later, and those two days decide which side of the entitlement you land on. Valeur meets that week by turning the clause into a calendar: which event triggers which clause, how many days that clause allows, and what follows when the window closes.
Twenty-three FIDIC notice clauses; the figures here were read out of the product’s own source while this page was written.
- 23 FIDIC clauses in one named list
- 11 of them carry a time bar
- 3 of those 11 bars are absolute — 8.4 · 19.1 · 20.1
- 10 carry a fixed window: 14, 21 or 28 days
One event’s life carries money at four points.
The four moments below stand in the order they happen to a single event, rather than the order in which a product would introduce itself. Each one closes on the rule that governs it.
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01
Say the event happens on Tuesday. You are told on Friday.
Three days of a 28-day window go to the telling. What starts the clock is not the moment you hear. It is the date of the event itself.
The obligation record takes the event date and counts the remaining days from there; the deadline is built as the event date plus the days the clause allows.
RuleThe last day is still inside the window. At zero the record stays triggered; it turns overdue once the count goes below zero. Which date goes in belongs to the caller, and the date the arithmetic ran from is written into the record’s own basis line.
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02
You learn which clause binds you after it has bound you.
Which notice provision an event triggers tends to get looked up while the claim is being assembled rather than while the event is happening. By then the window has already closed.
The notice calendar holds 23 FIDIC clauses in one named list. Each record carries its own trigger, the party the notice goes to, and the consequence when the window closes, on the same line.
ScopeTen of the twenty-three carry a fixed window: 14, 21 or 28 days. For the other thirteen the contract says “forthwith”. The calendar invents no day count for them; it anchors the claim to 20.1’s real 28-day bar, then writes that it did so into the basis line.
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03
The time to write the notice comes out of the time to think about it.
Part of the 28 days goes into building the letter itself: the reference number, the date format, which attachment to ask for.
Two of the twenty-three ship with a drafted notice: 8.4 extension of time and 20.1 contractor’s claim. The fields arrive filled. The draft places the project name, the event description, the event date, the days remaining and the sequence number into fields of their own; the 20.1 draft states in its own sentence that it meets the 28-day requirement and announces the detailed claim to follow within 84 days.
ScopeThe draft stands ready for those two clauses. For the other twenty-one the calendar gives the date and the consequence, and the letter comes from your own pen.
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04
The notice went out; the second obligation is next.
Under 20.1 and 8.4 the work continues past the notice: the detailed claim follows within 84 days. There are two dates. Holding the first date and losing the second lands in the same place as holding neither.
Both records carry that following obligation in a field of their own; the 84 days sit there as a property of the first date.
ScopeThat following field sits on the 8.4 and 20.1 records. The other twenty-one run on a single date.
Every figure in this section — including the clause counts, the window days and the period that follows the notice — was read by parsing the product’s own source while this page was written. The first moment, the one opening with “Say”, stands outside that: the delay there is a supposition, the mechanism is real. None of them is a customer outcome.
Disputes start inside the contract itself.
The two boxes below stand apart, and are meant to: the upper one is the sector’s published finding, the lower one is our own work.
In 2024 the leading cause of construction disputes was errors and omissions in the contract documents. Second in the ranking: parties failing to understand and comply with their contractual obligations. Third: employer-driven changes.
Arcadis, 15th Annual Construction Disputes Report — North America, 2025 (2024 data). This is a ranking rather than a percentage. Scope: North America.
That is what the sector measures. What follows is what we do. The notice calendar holds 23 FIDIC clauses in one list; eleven carry a time-bar flag, and three of those eleven carry a second flag marking the bar absolute. The moment an event is bound to a clause, the remaining days are counted from the event date and the record enters the alert lists on its own day count. This is the shape of the list — a structure rather than a result.
The Arcadis finding comes from a published ranking; the Valeur sentence beside it was read from the product source. The seam between the two boxes is deliberately left visible.
In some forms the notice is a condition precedent to the entitlement.
This section runs on two principles and was deliberately left free of figures.
In some standard forms these notices are expressed to be conditions precedent to entitlement.
Society of Construction Law, Delay and Disruption Protocol, 2nd Edition, 2017.
A notice given in accordance with the condition precedent keeps the right to claim alive; where the condition is unmet, the right falls away.
Pinsent Masons, Out-Law Analysis, 2023.
The calendar carries both principles as fields: a clause record that is time-barred stands flagged, and one whose bar is absolute carries a second flag. Three of the twenty-three carry that second flag: 8.4 (28 days), 19.1 (14 days) and 20.1 (28 days). The record’s own term is an absolute time bar. The legal characterisation above belongs to the citations, not to the record.
We deliberately use no percentage in this section. How many claims fall to a time bar is something we hold as a principle rather than as a published rate; the data stays inside private arbitration. A plausible-looking number placed here would read as though it came from the two citations beside it, and that is the most dangerous point in the doctrine.
The calendar’s factual base, in one table.
Every figure about the calendar comes from the rows below. The years and the sources stand above, in boxes of their own. The fourth and fifth are meant to be read as a pair: the first is the fact a brochure would print on its own, the second is the thirteen clauses that make it honest.
- Clauses tracked
- 23 FIDIC notice clauses, in one named list
- Carrying a time bar
- Eleven of the twenty-three
- Carrying an absolute time bar
- Three of the eleven: 8.4 (28 days), 19.1 (14 days), 20.1 (28 days)
- Carrying a fixed window
- Ten of the twenty-three; the windows are 14, 21 and 28 days
- Taking their period from the contract
- Thirteen of the twenty-three. The contract says “forthwith”; the calendar anchors the claim to 20.1’s 28-day bar and writes the basis into the record.
- Shipping with a drafted notice
- Two of the twenty-three: 8.4 and 20.1
- The obligation after the notice
- Under 8.4 and 20.1, the detailed claim within 84 days
Every row here was read while this page was written by parsing the product’s own source — by actually loading the list and counting it, rather than by searching for it.
Five questions a contracts manager asks.
How many clauses does the calendar track, and can I see the list?
Twenty-three FIDIC notice clauses. The list sits in one place in the source, and each record carries its trigger, the party the notice goes to, the days allowed and the consequence when the window closes. Eleven of the twenty-three are flagged as time-barred, and three of those eleven are flagged absolute as well. We open the list row by row on the call.
Does the system write the notice letter?
For two clauses the draft text is ready: 8.4 extension of time and 20.1 contractor’s claim. The draft places the project name, the event description, the event date, the days remaining and the reference number. For the other twenty-one the calendar gives the date and the consequence, and the letter comes from your own pen.
When does the clock start — the day of the event, or the day I hear about it?
From the event date. The days remaining are the deadline minus today. At zero the record is still triggered; once the count goes below zero it turns overdue. Which date goes in is yours to decide, and the date the arithmetic ran from is written into the record’s basis line.
I sent the notice. What comes next?
Under 20.1 and 8.4 the detailed claim follows within 84 days of the notice. That second date sits in a field on the first record and stands independent of any separate reminder list.
When do the alerts turn red?
Records between zero and seven days enter the alert list, and that list splits in two: three days or fewer is critical, three to seven is high. Eight to twenty-one days sits in the upcoming list. Records further out than twenty-one days wait in the calendar on their own dates and enter these lists as the window approaches.
See the notice calendar for your own contract.
Thirty minutes. Pick one event from a contract you already hold, and we will read together which clause it lands on, how many days it allows, and what happens when the window closes.