2 min read
"I told them on site" doesn't hold up in adjudication
It feels like a reasonable defence in the moment. Once a dispute goes to adjudication or court, "I told them on site" carries almost no weight at all. Here's why.
It's one of the most common things said in a construction dispute, and one of the least useful. "I told them on site" might well be true. The problem is that an adjudicator, judge, or arbitrator has no way to verify it, and construction adjudication in particular operates on tight timescales, typically 28 days, where there's no time to conduct a lengthy investigation into who said what to whom in a conversation nobody wrote down.
Adjudicators decide based on documents. That's not a preference, it's close to a structural necessity given how little time the process allows. A party that turns up with a clear paper trail, emails, instructions, photos with dates, is giving the adjudicator something they can rely on. A party that turns up with "I told them on site" is asking the adjudicator to choose between two competing, unverifiable accounts, and adjudicators generally resolve that kind of stalemate against whoever had the opportunity to create a record and didn't.
This catches out contractors more than clients in practice, because contractors are usually the ones on site making real-time decisions, and clients are usually the ones querying invoices after the fact with the benefit of hindsight and, often, professional advice. The contractor who did tell the client about a change, on site, verbally, in good faith, often loses not because they're wrong but because they can't prove they're right within the timescale the process allows.
The habit that changes this is small but has to be consistent. Any instruction, agreement, or significant decision made verbally on site gets confirmed in writing within the same day, even if it's just a short message. It doesn't need to be a legal document. It needs to exist, with a date, somewhere it can be found again. That single habit is often the difference between winning and losing an adjudication that otherwise comes down to nothing more than who sounds more credible.
This is precisely the kind of record a proper site diary is meant to create, not as an afterthought, but as a running account of what happened and when, built up automatically as the job progresses rather than reconstructed under pressure once a dispute has already started.