In Van Oord v Allseas [2015] EWHC 3074 (TCC), contractors claimed roughly ten million pounds for disruption and prolongation on a Shetland pipeline project. The claims failed almost completely. Reading the judgment, what is striking is not that the events were invented - rock was encountered, weather was foul, access was late. The claims died of something more mundane: substantiation.
The judge found global assertions where the court needed event-by-event causation. Pleadings that said one thing while the daily progress records said another. A notice served under the wrong clause, out of time. Witnesses whose evidence the contemporaneous record contradicted. Expert analysis the court called entirely worthless - because it rested on the pleadings instead of the documents.
The bitter irony: the record was there all along. Thousands of pages of daily reports, correspondence and programmes that could have supported a disciplined, evidenced claim - if anyone had connected each assertion to its proof while there was still time.
This is the failure mode datum is built against. Every factual sentence in a datum draft carries a citation to a specific page, checked in code against the source before it reaches a reviewer. Where evidence is partial, the sentence is flagged, not smoothed over. Where causation cannot be established from the record, the claim says so - because a court certainly will.
The uncomfortable question for any claims team is not whether your events happened. It is whether, sentence by sentence, you can prove what your record proves - before the other side's KC asks.