How do you prove a late-drawings claim?
With the document register and the transmittal log, which together are the contemporaneous proof of planned versus actual release dates. Under FIDIC-style contracts the engineer must issue drawings in reasonable time; the register is what shows whether they did. The subtlety that decides most of these claims: a deliverable “issued on time” but returned Code C twice was effectively late — so the date that matters is approved-for-construction, not first issue.
First issue is the wrong date
A design deliverable that lands on its due date and is then returned “revise and resubmit” twice was not delivered on its due date in any sense the site cares about. Nobody could build from it. Yet a register that only records first issue will show it as on time, and the claim built on that register will lose.
Sophisticated registers track the approved-for-construction date alongside the first-issue date. The gap between those two columns, across a design package, is the late-design-release claim.
The register cuts both ways
The same record that proves the employer released design late will just as happily prove the contractor sat on current information for three weeks before acting on it. Distribution and acknowledgment timestamps are not decoration — they are the other side’s case.
This is an argument for keeping the register honest, not for keeping it vague. A register maintained only when it flatters you is worth nothing when you need it, because the gaps are visible and a tribunal will read them the way they read a silent site diary.
References
- module: /modules/document-register/ — FIDIC-style drawing-issue obligations; transmittal linkage
Zepth is the construction project delivery platform — it runs construction, procurement and asset management on one record, and does the work: reading the drawings, reviewing the submittals, matching the invoices and flagging the risks, with a human sign-off on anything consequential.
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