Attn. Hal Deckert, VP Preconstruction · September 2026
The average North American construction dispute is now $60.1 million.
It was $18.8 million in 2019. Nothing about the way subcontracts get read has changed in those five years. For Tinbarrow, closing that gap takes about four minutes a contract.
How to read this. Five minutes, seven sections. Every industry figure is linked to its source. The only numbers here that are ours are the ones about us — and they are labelled.
Disputes got three times more expensive. Contract review didn’t change at all.
Value nearly quadrupled while resolution time hit a decade low. Disputes are resolving faster and costing far more — the cost is moving into the contract, not the courtroom. Arcadis 15th annual report
The two leading causes of construction disputes in North America are both failures to read a document.
That ranking has barely moved since 2014. In the same survey, the dispute-avoidance technique the industry ranks first is contract and specification review — the step the bid calendar is least willing to pay for. ENR
Three things preconstruction teams say, almost word for word.
“The sub package lands Thursday. The bid is due Monday.”
“Legal sees it after it’s signed, or not at all.”
“We know which clauses are risky. We can’t be sure we found them all in this one.”
None of that is a diligence problem. Your PMs have three days and nine other bids in front of them. Outside construction counsel bills $313 an hour on average — more for one review than the margin on some of the jobs the contract covers. Clio Legal Trends 2026
Claims don’t usually fail on the merits. They fail on a date.
Courts treat notice provisions as conditions precedent. A contractor can be left without recourse even where the owner had actual knowledge of the claim and can show no prejudice from the late notice. Peckar & Abramson
Contractor claims dismissed in their entirety for failure to meet a written-notice deadline after receiving change orders. The owner’s actual notice was held not to excuse it.
Delay damages worth roughly half the value of the subcontract were denied for failure to give notice inside the contractual window.
Every one of those clocks starts when the event happens — not when the field tells the office. In Texas, the Supreme Court has held that actual notice does not satisfy a written-notice requirement at all.
Seven provisions that move money.
Open any one. Each is standard language, not a trap — that is the problem. They read as boilerplate right up until the week they decide who pays.
What it says
You may get more time when someone else causes a delay. You will not get money. Often drafted to cover delay “however caused.”
Why it costs
Courts in most states enforce it, subject to a handful of exceptions — bad faith, active interference, abandonment, fundamental breach. Several states limit it by statute, some only on public work, some on both public and private. It is also largely a US phenomenon, so an owner’s international form may not have it at all.
What we do
Flag it, name the exceptions your state actually recognises, and give you fallback language that carves out owner-caused and owner-directed delay — the two categories that account for most of what you’d want back.
What it says
Pay-when-paid delays your payment a reasonable time. Pay-if-paid makes the owner’s payment a condition precedent — if the owner never pays, neither does anyone above you.
Why it costs
It moves owner-insolvency risk down the chain in a single conditional. New York and California void it by decision; North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia by statute. Virginia’s ban took effect 1 January 2023 and covers public and private work, with a narrow insolvency exception. Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas, Utah and Vermont restrict it in different ways.
What we do
Identify which of the two you are actually being handed, check it against the governing-law state as the statutes stand, and mark whether the clause survives there at all.
What it says
Written notice of a claim within 5, 14, 21 or 30 days of the event — and frequently a second, longer window for detailed substantiation.
Why it costs
It is enforced as a condition precedent. Perini cost roughly $16M on a 30-day window; Morelli Masons cost over $3M on a five-day one. Neither turned on whether the claim was good.
What we do
Extract every window in the document into one dated list your PM can put on the job calendar, and flag any window shorter than the reporting cadence the project actually runs on.
What it says
You indemnify the party above you for claims arising out of the work — sometimes including that party’s own negligence, in whole or in part.
Why it costs
Anti-indemnity statutes look like protection and mostly aren’t complete. Of the 43 states with one, only 28 bar indemnity for partial fault; 15 bar sole fault only, leaving intermediate-form indemnity enforceable. And only six states close the additional-insured loophole — so in most of the country an AI endorsement hands back what the statute took away.
What we do
Read the indemnity and the insurance article together, because that is the only way the loophole is visible, and tell you what the pairing actually exposes.
What it says
Both sides waive consequential damages. AIA A201 §15.1.7 is the standard form of it.
Why it costs
The AIA waiver expressly carves out liquidated damages — so the owner keeps its daily LDs while you give up lost profit, lost opportunity and financing costs. What counts as consequential is genuinely unsettled; Virginia courts have put home-office overhead on the waived side.
What we do
Check whether the waiver is actually mutual once the carve-outs are read, and show you where the same form has been amended on comparable jobs.
What it says
The party above you may terminate at any time, for its own convenience, without cause.
Why it costs
Under the AIA baseline you recover work performed, demobilisation, subcontractor closeout, and overhead and profit on unexecuted work — though the last is routinely negotiated away. A subcontract that strikes demobilisation is not a matter of judgement; it is a marked departure from the standard form, and it is cheap to catch.
What we do
Diff the clause against the standard form it was derived from and list every deletion, so “this is just the standard AIA language” becomes a checkable statement.
What it says
The prime contract, the specifications, “all addenda and supplementary contract documents” are made part of your subcontract — usually without identifying which parts apply to your scope.
Why it costs
You are bound to terms you often have not read and sometimes have not received. Where incorporation is that broad and terms conflict, the conflict resolves against the drafter — which cuts both ways and leaves everybody uncertain.
What we do
Name every document the subcontract pulls in, tell you which ones you are missing, and read the ones you do have alongside it rather than in isolation.
Anti-indemnity statutes protect you less than their headline count suggests.
Counts from a 50-state survey; statutes change, and we re-check the governing-law state on every review rather than trusting a table. Source
Four minutes, inside the bid window you already have.
No integration, no portal for your PMs to learn, no change to how the package reaches you. Ridgeclause reads what already lands in the preconstruction inbox.
It arrives
Forward the email, or drag the PDF in. Scanned, native, 60 pages or 140 — including the exhibits and the incorporated documents, if you have them.
It comes back marked
A redlined PDF and a one-page summary. Flags ranked by what the provision costs, not by how unusual it is, each citing the exact article and page it came from.
Your PM acts
Send the redline with fallback language that has been accepted on comparable work — or sign it, on time, knowing precisely what was signed.
One customer, first year.
A $210M-revenue general contractor in the Mid-Atlantic, 34 people in preconstruction. Our numbers, not the industry’s — we’ll walk you through how each was counted.
Before: one person reviewed the high-value subcontracts at roughly ninety minutes each, which covered about a third of the annual volume. The other two thirds were signed on reputation and the bid calendar. After: all 340, at four minutes each.
In the first month it flagged a seven-day notice provision buried in an article separate from the delay clause, on a $4.1M electrical package. Two years earlier the same pairing had cost them a forty-day delay claim — denied on notice, not on merit.
“We didn’t change our process. We added four minutes to it.”
What this is not.
Not legal advice, and not a substitute for your counsel. It is a reading tool. When something needs a lawyer, it tells you that, early enough to be useful.
Not a signature workflow. It reads contracts. It does not route, store or execute them, and it does not want to be your CLM.
Not a black box. Every flag cites the article, page and sentence it came from, so your PM can check it in the document rather than trust it.
Not shared, and not training data. Your contracts stay yours: encrypted at rest, deleted on request, never used to train a model.
Priced on contract volume. Never on seats.
Every PM, estimator, project executive and in-house counsel at Tinbarrow is included at both tiers. Charging you per person would be charging you for reading more of your own contracts.
At the 240 subcontracts Tinbarrow signed last year, that is $171 a contract — including the ones nobody would have had time to open.
Subcontracts, purchase orders, master service agreements, owner-contractor agreements and their exhibits. Native PDF or scanned.
- Median turnaround four minutes; one business hour guaranteed
- Redlined PDF plus a one-page summary ranked by cost exposure
- Every flag cites article, page and sentence
For every flagged provision, the alternative wording that has actually been accepted on comparable work — ranked by how often it survived, and by market.
- Written to be pasted into your redline, not rewritten
- Marked where a provision is, in practice, never negotiable
Statutory checks run against the governing-law state: anti-indemnity, contingent payment, prompt payment, retainage caps, no-damages-for-delay limits, lien waiver form requirements.
- Updated when statutes change — Virginia’s pay-if-paid ban is why we don’t ship a static table
- Flags the mismatch when the governing-law state isn’t the project state
Precon, PMs, project executives, ops, in-house counsel. No seat administration, no licence reconciliation at renewal.
Send any flagged contract to a licensed construction attorney in the governing-law state. Written memo back within one business day.
- For the provisions worth a real opinion, on the jobs that justify it
- Twenty-four a year included; additional at $640 each
- Engagement runs directly with the firm — we don’t practise law
The incorporated documents read alongside the subcontract, so the flow-down is assessed against what it actually pulls in rather than against a promise that it will.
- Names every document referenced, and which ones you were never sent
- Flags conflicts between the prime and the sub
Patterns across everything you signed that quarter: which owners and GCs are hardening terms, which provisions you concede most often, where your standard position has quietly drifted.
- Written, not a meeting
- Benchmarked against anonymised terms from comparable contractors
Term
Annual, renewing November 2027. Priced on volume, so it does not move when you hire.
Overage
$180 a contract past 250. Never a forced upgrade, and never a hard stop mid-bid.
The out
If the first 25 contracts surface nothing you would have signed as written, cancel inside 30 days for a full refund.
If you only take three things from this.
The two leading causes of construction disputes in North America are both failures to read a document in time.
Claims are lost on notice windows, not on merit — and the window closes before the office hears about it.
Four minutes a contract, inside the bid calendar you already keep.
Send us one.
Pick a subcontract you are about to sign this month. The messier the better — the ones with four exhibits and a prime contract referenced but not attached are where we are most useful.
- Send one contract. We return it marked up within one business day.
- Read it and decide whether we caught anything you would have signed.
- Talk to us only if the answer is yes.
No account, no call, no obligation to speak to anyone afterwards. If it comes back empty, that is a useful answer too.
Eleven years in preconstruction before this. I signed the clause in section 03 — the five-day one — on a mechanical package in 2016, and found out what it meant eleven months later.