Procurement & finance
Pay-Less Notice
A formal notice, served within a contractual window, stating that the employer intends to pay less than the sum applied for and why. Serve it late, and the full amount can become payable regardless of its merits.
This is one of the few places in construction where the law hands a contractor a genuinely powerful weapon, and it is a procedural one. The deduction may be entirely justified — defective work, contra charges, a legitimate re-measurement — and it can still be lost, in full, because the notice went in a day late.
The lesson is the same one the time bar teaches from the other direction: in construction, being right is a necessary condition and not a sufficient one. The calendar decides at least as often as the merits do.