AI for Claims Management

Claims management is the work of establishing entitlement and proving it. Extensions of time, loss and expense, disruption, and the correspondence that either builds a case or quietly dismantles it. It is document work, which is why AI helps. It is also judgement work with money attached, which is why the limits matter more here than on almost any other page on this site. The prompts collected here cover the drafting: structuring an EOT submission, building a chronology, summarising a dispute position, and writing the notices that have to go out before entitlement is lost. WHERE AI GENUINELY HELPS Chronologies. Building a dated sequence of events from correspondence, site records and minutes is the foundation of any claim, and it is brutally slow. Give an AI a folder of dated material and ask for a chronology and you get in twenty minutes what takes two days. This is the single highest-value use and almost nobody does it. Structure. A claim submission has a conventional shape: the contractual basis, the facts, the causal link, the effect, the relief sought. AI holds that structure reliably, which stops the common failure of a submission that describes what happened at length and never quite says which clause it relies on. First drafts of notices. Under NEC4 the clock is short and unforgiving. A draft in front of you the same day is what gets a notice served on time. Finding the gaps. Ask an AI to read your draft and list every assertion that is not supported by a document reference. It is uncomfortable reading and it is exactly what the other side's consultant will do. WHERE IT STOPS, AND THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART Delay analysis. AI cannot do it and should not be asked. Whether a delay is critical, whether it is concurrent, which of two competing causes drove completion, all of that requires proper analysis of a programme by someone who knows what they are doing. The recognised methods, as set out in the SCL Delay and Disruption Protocol, are technical exercises on real programme data. An AI narrative that says the delay was critical, with no analysis behind it, is worse than useless because it reads convincingly. Entitlement. Whether your facts fall within clause 60.1 of NEC4 or constitute a Relevant Event under JCT is a legal question about your contract, including whatever Z clauses or bespoke amendments sit on top of it. AI will answer confidently. Do not act on that answer. Quantum. Loss and expense has to be proven, from records, to a standard that survives scrutiny. Global claims fail regularly in UK courts precisely because the causal link between event and cost was never established item by item. AI cannot establish it and cannot substitute for the records you either kept or did not. CONFIDENTIALITY, AND THIS ONE IS NOT OPTIONAL Before any live dispute material goes into an AI tool, three checks. What your contract says about confidentiality. What your firm's policy is. Whether the tool trains on your inputs. And a fourth that people miss: privilege. Material prepared for a dispute may attract legal privilege, and how you handle it can affect whether that protection holds. If solicitors are instructed, ask them before putting anything through a third-party tool. Assume that in a dispute everything you generate may become disclosable, and that a document created by an AI on your instruction is your document. WHEN NOT TO USE THESE PROMPTS AT ALL Where the matter is already in adjudication, arbitration or litigation. At that point you are working to your legal team's direction and freelancing with AI-drafted submissions can actively harm your position. Where the claim is the last resort for a relationship that could still be saved. A well-drafted claim submission is an escalation. Sometimes the commercially better move is a conversation, and once the submission lands that option narrows. Where you do not have the records. The uncomfortable truth about claims is that most are won or lost long before anyone drafts anything, in whether site records, delay notices and correspondence were kept contemporaneously. If they were not, no amount of drafting fixes it, and a well-written claim on poor records just makes the weakness more visible. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS What is the difference between an EOT claim and a loss and expense claim? They are separate claims with separate tests and they need separate evidence. An extension of time relieves you of liability for delay damages and moves the completion date. Loss and expense, or compensation under NEC4, recovers the money. Winning the first does not automatically get you the second, and this catches people constantly: an EOT award tells you that a relevant event delayed completion, but the costs still have to be proven separately. Under NEC4 the compensation event mechanism handles both together, which is one of its genuine advantages. Can AI do the delay analysis? No. Say the word critical about a delay and you are making a technical assertion about the programme that has to be supported by proper analysis on real programme data. AI can write the narrative around an analysis somebody competent has done. It cannot do the analysis, and a submission where the delay conclusion came from a language model will not survive the first serious challenge. How important are contemporaneous records really? They are usually the whole case. Records made at the time carry weight that reconstructions do not, and a tribunal knows the difference. Daily logs, delay notices served when the event happened, photographs with dates, minutes recording the discussion. The firms that win claims are the ones whose site teams kept records when nothing was going wrong. The best claims advice is not about drafting at all: it is to notify early and record everything, because by the time you know you have a claim it is generally too late to create the evidence. What happens if we miss a notice deadline? Depends on the contract, and the difference matters. NEC4 clause 61.3 has a genuine time bar: fail to notify a compensation event within eight weeks of becoming aware and, subject to the exceptions, you lose entitlement outright. JCT is generally less brutal, with notice requirements that are conditions but rarely absolute bars, though late notice damages your position and can reduce what you recover. Never rely on that softness. Diary the dates off your own contract and treat every one as absolute. Should we use AI on a claim that is already with solicitors? Ask them first, every time. Once lawyers are instructed there are privilege considerations that affect how documents should be created and handled, and putting draft material through a third-party tool may have consequences nobody wants to discover at disclosure. Your solicitors may be entirely comfortable with it for background work. Get that in writing rather than assuming.