Contemporaneous Records
Records created at the time the events occurred, as part of ordinary business — diaries, photographs, correspondence, timesheets, quantity records. They are the foundation of every construction claim, and they cannot be manufactured later.
The word is doing real work. A record made contemporaneously carries weight precisely because it was made before anybody knew it would matter — there was no incentive to shade it. A record assembled two years later, for the purpose of the claim, has exactly the opposite property, and a tribunal will treat it accordingly.
And they can tell. Reconstructed records are too tidy, too consistent, too convenient. They agree with each other in ways real records never do, because real site diaries contradict each other slightly, contain irrelevant weather notes, and record the day somebody’s van was blocked in. That texture is the evidence of authenticity, and it cannot be faked in a way that survives cross-examination.