When Your Contract Finally Shows Up On Site

On most projects the contract lives in a ring binder or a shared drive.

Everyone agrees it is important. Everyone nods when someone says “have you checked the contract”. Then the phone rings, a crane turns up early, a delivery is late, someone is chasing an RFI, and the contract quietly drifts back to the shelf.

Until something goes wrong.

A delay. A variation that was never priced correctly. An argument over who carried what risk. At that point the team finally dives into the legal text, but by then it is usually forensic. You are not trying to protect margin any more. You are trying to work out how much has already leaked away.

In one recent onboarding session with a customer, a simple example captured this perfectly.

The six hour delay that no one had time to think about

Picture a commercial manager in a busy project office.

The phones are buzzing. A foreman walks past the door and says “the jumbo has been down all morning”. Someone else is asking about a glazing lead time. Another person is trying to finalise a programme update.

The delay gets captured somewhere. Maybe in a site diary. Maybe in an email. Maybe in a WhatsApp thread that will never see the light of day in a formal claim.

No one has time to pull out the contract, flip to page one hundred and ten, and read the production relief clause. No one stops to ask

• Is this delay actually claimable
• How much money is at stake
• What do we need to notify and by when

So the team keeps moving. The job keeps rolling. And a small but very real loss is locked in.

Not because the contract was unfair. Not because the site team did not care. Simply because the contract never made it into the moment when a decision had to be made.

What the contract actually said

In the onboarding call, we walked through a clause that looked very familiar.

There was a threshold on delay.

The first part of any delay was on the contractor. Anything beyond that threshold could be claimed through a production relief process, provided the right notice went in within a very specific window.

It was not a complex legal argument. It was not a four month dispute. It was a simple rule.

If you lose more than three hours for a qualifying event and you tell the client in time, you can get paid.

If you do not, you carry the loss.

The problem is that this rule lives in a long document that no one on site has the time or the headspace to sift through on a tough day. The practical question on a live shift is much simpler.

“We just lost six hours. Is this a big deal or not”

The question that changes everything

During the session, we showed the customer what happens when you let the contract answer that question for you.

You take the executed contract.
You link it once inside Hevi.
You let the AI read it and understand the key commercial rules.

Then in the heat of the day, someone can ask a plain language question against that contract

We have had a six hour delay on the jumbo because of a breakdown. What does the contract say about this and what can we claim

Instead of a vague answer or a promise to “come back to you”, the system can respond in seconds with something like

• The contract has a three hour delay threshold for this type of event
• You are currently three hours beyond that threshold
• Based on the rate adjustment table, the first pass impact is around five thousand dollars
• You must notify the principal by tomorrow to preserve your entitlement
• Here are the exact clauses and page references that support this

It is not a final legal position. It is not a full delay analysis. It is a fast, defensible first pass.

Most importantly, it lands while the team still has time to do something about it.

First pass, not final verdict

This is the subtle shift that came through in that customer conversation.

The most valuable use of contract AI on a project is not to replace your legal team or your commercial managers. It is to give them a head start.

The machine does the boring work

• It reads the contract and finds the relevant clauses
• It joins the dots between a real event and a contractual rule
• It runs basic maths against your rate schedules
• It reminds you about notice windows and procedural steps

The humans still do the hard work

• They decide whether the facts line up with the clause
• They judge the relationship with the client
• They choose how hard to push and when
• They own the strategy and the communication

That first pass answer does not close anything off. It opens the right conversation at the right time.

Instead of discovering after the fact that you could have claimed, the team is having that discussion on the day of the event, with the relevant pages of the contract already highlighted.

Bringing the contract to the front line

There is a quiet but important insight here.

Most people talk about contract tech in terms of document review at tender, or smart obligation registers, or better handover packs. All of that matters.

But the real return comes when the contract finally shows up where the money is actually made or lost

On the site.
In the diary entry.
In the delay email.
In the small decisions that never feel worth a trip through a four hundred page deed.

When AI can sit on top of that world and answer questions like

• Are we about to lose money here
• What does the contract say about this exact situation
• What do we need to tell the client and by when

suddenly the contract is not a static document in a folder. It becomes a live tool that guides behaviour.

What this looks like in practice

For the customer in that onboarding session, the journey looks something like this

They upload their head contracts and key subcontracts into Hevi once.
They link those documents to each project in the portal.
They let the system extract workflows and obligations into simple checklists.
They route emails and site communications through a project inbox that Hevi can read.
They encourage the team to ask questions in plain english whenever something happens.

Over time, the culture shifts.

People stop guessing.
They stop hoping someone will “check the contract later”.
They start making decisions with a live view of financial impact and notice requirements.

You still need good people.
You still need discipline.
You still need judgement.

But you are no longer asking them to be full time contract lawyers on top of their day job.

The quiet advantage

The nugget from that call was not a dramatic story about a giant dispute that was avoided.

It was much simpler.

“If I can get a quick answer on what this means for the job, while I am still in the middle of dealing with it, that changes everything.”

That is the gap we are trying to close with Hevi.

We want your contracts to stop gathering dust in a binder.
We want them to speak up when it matters.
We want your site teams to know, in the moment, when they are about to leave money on the table.

Because once the concrete is poured and the shift is finished, the best contract in the world cannot fix a decision that was made in the dark.

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