Notifica della pretesa FIDIC entro 28 giorni: la pretesa che si perde prima di discuterla

306 days of delay, and no extension of time

The East 40 Building in Al Furjan, Dubai, a residential tower of 112 units, was contracted on the FIDIC 1999 Red Book, governed by DIFC law. The DIFC trial judge found that completion was delayed by 325 days, of which only 19 days were due to the contractor and 306 days were attributable to the employer.

The contractor still did not get its extension of time. The judge held it was debarred by its failure to comply with the time requirements of Sub-Clause 20.1, and he put a figure on what that cost: if it were not debarred, the contractor would be entitled to AED 1,741,313.42 in prolongation damages. On 12 May 2023 the DIFC Court of Appeal dismissed the contractor's appeal.

The Court of Appeal put it plainly:

There is no doubt that the 28-day notice requirement in Sub-Clause 20.1 is a condition precedent to the Contractor's entitlement to obtain an extension of time, however strong his claim to an extension of time might be otherwise.

That is the argument of this post: a construction claim can be lost on paperwork before anyone argues its merits, and the paperwork is a solvable problem. A "condition precedent" is a step you must take before a right exists at all. Miss it and the right does not arise, however good the facts.

The FIDIC notice of claim clock: 28 days, then 84

Panther was a 1999-edition contract. FIDIC released the second editions of its Red, Yellow and Silver Books in December 2017, and the 2017 Red Book puts Employer and Contractor claims through the same procedure in Clause 20.

As Fenwick Elliott summarises it, the claiming Party gives a Notice of Claim as soon as practicable and no later than 28 days after it became aware, or should have become aware, of the event (Sub-Clause 20.2.1). If the Engineer thinks the Notice is late, it must say so, with reasons, within 14 days; if it does not, the Notice is deemed valid (20.2.2). Within 84 days of awareness, or another agreed period, comes the fully detailed Claim: a description of the event, a statement of the contractual and/or other legal basis, the contemporary records relied on, and particulars of the money or time claimed (20.2.4). Claims of continuing effect add monthly interim updates and a final claim within 28 days of the end of the effects (20.2.6).

Note what the 84 days runs from: FIDIC's own published corrections to the 2017 Red Book confirm it is measured from the date the claiming Party "became aware, or should have become aware of, the event or circumstance", not from the date of the Notice.

The 2017 Red Book claims clock

The 2017 edition is harsher in one place and softer in another. Harsher: under the 1999 edition the detailed claim was due in 42 days, and the Panther Court of Appeal held that missing it was not itself fatal, while under 2017 a missing legal-basis statement can make the Notice lapse. Softer: Sub-Clause 20.2.5 lets the Engineer weigh late submission, including the prejudice to the other Party and evidence of its prior knowledge of the event.

Read the Particular Conditions before you trust any number above

FIDIC itself says it increasingly sees "FIDIC contracts" whose General Conditions are substantially rewritten through the Particular Conditions. Its Golden Principles say time periods must be of reasonable duration, and give as a non-compliant example a requirement to notify a claim within 5 days. Al Tamimi & Company wrote in 2015 that Clause 20.1 is often amended to restrict the time periods for notification and to attach time bars to particulars as well. And under the UAE's new Civil Transactions Law, in standard-form contracts "the conditions added to these forms shall prevail over the original conditions, even if the latter are not struck out" (Article 221(3)).

What a valid notice looks like, and when the clock starts

The bar for content is low. In Obrascon v Attorney General for Gibraltar, the English Technology and Construction Court said no particular form is called for, and that the notice must describe the event and be "recognisable as a 'claim'". The DIFC Court of Appeal agreed that the 28-day notice "can be short and to the point".

The bar for form is higher, and it is where good notices die. In Obrascon, a progress report saying "The adverse weather condition (rain) have [sic] affected the works" was "clearly nowhere near a notice". The 2017 forms require a Notice to be identified as a Notice, which, as a 2019 Keating Chambers article puts it, means meeting minutes or progress reports cannot be a Notice unless they are identified as one. Commentary on the second editions adds that Sub-Clause 1.3 names who must sign or send a Notice, and that it goes to the recipient's address in the Contract Data.

On timing, the courts disagree. Akenhead J in Obrascon reasoned that an extension can be claimed "either when it is clear that there will be delay (a prospective delay) or when the delay has been at least started to be incurred". The DIFC Court of Appeal held instead that the 28 days is "triggered when the Contractor becomes aware (or ought to have become aware) not of the delay or likely delay but of the event or circumstance giving rise to the claim". For a register, the cautious reading is the DIFC one: start the clock at the event, not on the day the delay bites.

Construction claim time bars in the UAE: the DIFC and onshore differ

The DIFC has its own contract law, and the Panther contract was governed by it, with disputes reserved to the DIFC Courts. There, the Court of Appeal enforced the 28-day notice and rejected the contractor's good faith argument: the contractor "was a willing party to a contract which included the 28-day notice requirement", and those provisions "admit of no scope for the postulated implied term or obligation of good faith".

Onshore UAE is less settled, and the statute changed this year. Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025 issued a new Civil Transactions Law, repealed the 1985 Civil Code, and entered into force on 1 June 2026. The new law "shall not apply retroactively to preceding facts and acts, unless the law provides otherwise" (Article 4(1)), so older projects may still be argued under the 1985 text.

Two provisions carry the argument against strict time bars. Article 443(1) provides that it may not "be agreed that a claim shall not be admissible after a period other than that specified by law". Article 221(1) requires a contract to be performed "in a manner consistent with the requirements of good faith". The commentary we found was written under the 1985 Code, where the same rules sat in Articles 487 and 246.

On one side, UAE contributors to the IBA's Construction Law International wrote in 2020 that Sub-Clause 20.1 "will not necessarily be treated as a condition precedent to the claim with the effect of precluding recovery as a matter of UAE law", relying on the rule against agreeing a different limitation period. Al Tamimi & Company wrote in 2015 that the Civil Code's good faith, disproportionate harm and unjust enrichment provisions "act against such time bar clauses". On the other side, Fenwick Elliott wrote in 2023 that there is "a common misconception in the UAE" that such provisions will not be enforced, and Hogan Lovells' view was that, on the good faith point, the outcome "should ultimately be the same if UAE law was applied".

Onshore, then, the position is contested. We did not find a reasoned onshore judgment in English to cite here, and Fenwick Elliott explains why: most UAE construction disputes "are either litigated in the local courts or in arbitration behind closed doors", which makes reasoned English-language judgments hard to find. Our read, for planning purposes: run the project as if every time bar will be enforced, and treat the arguments against it as a fallback for a lawyer to run, not a plan.

The notices the statute adds (an original count)

The Civil Transactions Law also carries notice duties of its own. We read all 28 articles of the Muqawala (contracting) chapter of the 2025 law, Articles 812 to 839, in the English text on the UAE government's legislation portal, and searched each for the words "notify", "notice" and "warn" and their variants. Five articles use those words: 816, 818, 825, 828 and 837. In each of the five, whether a notice was given changes who bears a loss or whether a remedy is available.

Two of them bite the contractor directly:

• Article 816(3). If defects appear in employer-supplied materials, "or if other factors arose that would hinder the execution of the work in appropriate conditions, the contractor shall immediately notify the employer thereof". If it does not, it is "liable for all consequences resulting from such failure".
• Article 828(1). On a unit-price bill of quantities, if executing the design needs a non-burdensome excess over the estimated quantities, the contractor must notify the employer and state the expected increase. If it does not, its "right to recover the expenses exceeding the value of the estimated bill of quantities shall lapse".

Article 816(3) says "immediately"; Article 828(1) states no period. Whether a FIDIC contract displaces them is a question for your lawyer; whether they belong in your register is not.

The fix: a notice register, built on day one

A notice register is two tables. Table A lists every obligation to give notice, once, at contract award. Table B logs every event as it happens and ties it to the obligations it triggers. Copy these.

Table A: notice obligations (one row per obligation)

Table B: event log (one row per event)

E-014 is an illustration, not a real project; its dates count calendar days, so check how your contract defines a day. Two rules make the register work. "Date aware" is a judgement, so a named person signs it off and records why. And the Source column says GC, PC or statute, because FIDIC's own Golden Principles warn that changes recorded only in tender emails, rather than in the Particular Conditions, may lose out to the General Conditions under the contract's priority of documents.

Where AI fits, and where it does not

In this workflow AI does the reading and the drafting; the judgement and the sending stay with people.

• Gather the set first. Contract Agreement, Letter of Acceptance, Particular Conditions and Contract Data, General Conditions, specification, BOQ and programme. A model can only extract obligations from documents it has, which is why intake comes before prompting.
• Extract Table A, then check it by hand. Ask for every notice obligation with the clause text quoted verbatim, so each row can be checked against the source. A missed row is the expensive error, so a person reads the notice clauses end to end against the output. Why the clause text itself, not a summary, is what you check is its own post.
• Log each event as it arrives. Add each new letter, instruction or set of minutes and ask which rows in Table A it might trigger. The model proposes; the contracts manager decides the awareness date.
• Keep the clock outside the model. Deadlines live in Table B and in a shared calendar, reviewed weekly and sorted by days left.
• Draft, then a human sends. Ask for a Notice of Claim that is identified as a Notice, names the sub-clause and describes the event. An authorised signatory reviews and signs it, it goes by the method in the Contract Data, and the proof of receipt goes in Table B.

A prompt for step 2:

You are reviewing the contract documents in this project.
1. List every obligation on the Contractor to give a notice, Notice or notification, in the General Conditions, the Particular Conditions and any other contract document.
2. For each, give: clause reference; trigger; deadline and what it runs from; required form; recipient and address for notices; consequence of missing it.
3. Quote the clause text verbatim.
4. Where the Particular Conditions change a General Conditions period, show both and say which document prevails under the priority clause.
5. If a field is not stated in the documents, write "not stated". Do not infer it.

The numbering is deliberate. HAQQ's own documentation, on multi-part redlining requests, advises numbering them: "Numbered instructions are processed more accurately than paragraph-form requests."

Doing this in HAQQ today

The reading and drafting steps above run on features that are live in HAQQ today. Create a project for the contract: files you attach on a project page go into that project's own data room. HAQQ's documentation lists the file types the assistant can read, including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and CSV, so the BOQ spreadsheet can sit next to the signed PDF. You can upload multiple files for comparative review, ask for a consolidated analysis across a data room, and work in Arabic, English or French.

For step 5, HAQQ drafts from a prompt or a template, lets you refine the draft with tracked changes, and exports to Word. Nothing in this workflow is automatic: you add each letter to the project as it arrives, and the deadline lives in your register and your calendar.

Key Takeaways

• A FIDIC claim can be lost on notice: in Panther, 306 of 325 days of delay were attributable to the employer, and the contractor's extension of time still failed.
• FIDIC 2017: Notice of Claim within 28 days of awareness, fully detailed Claim within 84 days of awareness (not of the Notice).
• Read the Particular Conditions first; amendments often change the periods.
• In the DIFC the 28-day notice is a condition precedent. Onshore, enforcement is contested; plan as if it will be enforced.
• The UAE's 2025 Civil Transactions Law adds statutory notices (Articles 816(3) and 828(1)). Put them in the register.
• Let AI read and draft. Keep the awareness date, the deadline and the decision to send with a named person.

Sources & further reading

• Panther Real Estate Development LLC v Modern Executive Systems Contracting LLC [2022] DIFC CA 016 (12 May 2023), DIFC Courts
• Obrascon Huarte Lain SA v Her Majesty's Attorney General for Gibraltar [2014] EWHC 1028 (TCC), The National Archives (Find Case Law)
• Federal Decree-Law No. (25) of 2025 Promulgating the Civil Transactions Law, UAE Legislation portal
• FIDIC Golden Principles
• FIDIC, amendments (errata) to the 2017 Red Book
• Fenwick Elliott, Changes to the Claims provisions in the 2017 FIDIC Red Book (2019)
• Fenwick Elliott, FIDIC Contracts: time bars, limitation and good faith (2023)
• Keating Chambers, The Evolution of Notice Provisions in the FIDIC Suite (2019)
• IBA Construction Law International, FIDIC around the world (December 2020)
• HAQQ docs, Using the Chat Interface
• HAQQ docs, AI Document Review
• HAQQ, AI contract drafting