5 Tips for Success When Claiming for Variations

A question that I am often asked during CPD talks and claims training courses is “is it necessary to submit claims for a variation?”. Unfortunately, I am going to have to give a lawyer’s answer to this and say that “it depends”. There are however essential elements to a successful claim.

If the party responsible for administering the contract follows the procedure set out in most forms of contracts for instructing variations, then the answer is “no”, because the variation has been acknowledged and it will either be measured and evaluated as part of the remeasurement on a remeasureable contract or as a separate evaluation leading to a change of the contract price of a lump sum contract.Read more


Claim for Increased Costs on a Fixed Price Contract

Are there circumstances whereby a contractor may claim increased costs of materials on a fixed price contract? As usual, this would depend on the particular contract, but if we take FIDIC as an example, yes there are.Read more


Variations and Additional Preliminaries

One of our Distance Learning students raised an interesting question on preliminary costs (preliminaries) and variations recently, which was:

'If a variation causes the contractor to incur additional preliminary costs, should these be claimed as part of the variation, or should a separate claim be submitted?'Read more


Does a Variation Lead to One Claim or Three?

One of our distance learning students recently asked the following question: if a variation causes additional work, a delay to the completion date and leads to entitlement to the payment of associated prolongation costs, should one claim be submitted for the whole thing, because all the entitlement stems from the variation?Read more