JULY 20, 2026 — by Director Avi Sharma, PSP and Managing Directors Steve Dimakos and Drew Olson, CPA, CFF of Delta Consulting Group.

Originally published in the American Bar Association’s Coverage Journal. View the original publication here.

Builder’s risk delay claims often turn on a deceptively simple question: when would the project have been completed if the loss had not occurred? In theory, that question can be answered by reference to the project schedule. In practice, the schedule is often incomplete, outdated or shaped by contract administration rather than by actual field progress. When that happens, the parties are left to reconstruct the project’s pre-loss trajectory from the broader project record.

The preparation and recovery of a builder’s risk delay claim rests on a well-established technical framework. Typically, the insured party’s project would have a projected pre-loss project completion date used for scheduling and project management. This date represents the time it would have taken to complete the project had the loss not occurred. From the projected date, the period of delay would be determined as the delta between the estimated projected completion date and the actual time of completion. Everything downstream, including whether the loss affected the critical path (activities that impact the completion date of schedule) and how much of the resulting delay is compensable, depends on establishing that pre-loss date with confidence.

That framework has one pre-condition that few experts spend time to validate: it assumes the pre-loss schedule is a reliable record of how the project was actually progressing prior to the loss. This is an area of disagreement that generally requires the experts to go outside the settled technical framework to the varied opinions of each expert that may ultimately bear a different conclusion.

The Record Problem

Baseline schedules (the schedules set at the start of the project) are often created because the contract requires one, not because the project team plans to use it for planning or to run the job day to day. Once approved, it may never get revisited. Contractors typically submit schedule updates on a regular basis because the contract requires them to include an updated schedule with each pay application. However, these updates often reflect little more than adjusted dates on paper and may not accurately capture what is actually happening in the field.

These schedule updates also ignore major project issues such as labor shortages, material delays and sequencing changes. In some cases, the schedule gets manually adjusted behind the scenes to artificially make the project appear to be on track, with no explanation as to why or what changes were made to the schedule. In many cases, the artificial changes might be to reduce durations during the later part of the schedule, without any discussion with the subcontractors that they would need to bring extra crews or work longer hours to account for that duration change. The schedule exists and looks current, but it isn’t actually tracking the real project work in the field.

These issues can be seen on projects of every size and level of sophistication. It shows up on jobs valued at only a few million dollars with no dedicated scheduling resources, and can be equally prevalent on multi-billion dollar projects with full-time schedulers and monthly submittals required by contract. The sheer size and complexity of larger projects just makes it less obvious when the schedule stops reflecting reality.

Why This Matters More for Builder’s Risk Claims

When a loss occurs on a project where schedule records are unreliable, identifying the completion date the project would have achieved but for the loss requires more than simply reading a date from the file. Instead, that date must be reconstructed from the project record and supported through a detailed schedule analysis.

In a straightforward delay dispute between an owner and a contractor, both parties lived through the project. They have institutional knowledge, firsthand experience, correspondence and countless project interactions to fall back on, even if the schedule itself may be unreliable. An insurer evaluating a builder’s risk claim has none of those advantages or history with the project. The adjuster and the insurer’s scheduling consultants must reconstruct the project entirely from whatever documentation exists (or has been provided), often built well after the fact from records that were never created for the purposes of submission of an insurance claim.

That information gap creates ground for competing narratives. A thinly prepared pre-loss record makes it easier for the insurer to argue that the project was already behind schedule, that particular activity was not truly on the critical path (activities that delay the project completion date) or that alleged delay is attributable to something other than the covered loss. Those arguments may not be correct, but they can be argued in absence of clean, contemporaneous records to rule them out. As a result, the insured party is often forced to defend not only the merits of the delay claims but also the adequacy of the project document itself. This creates a materially weaker position than defending the delay claims on its merits alone.

Reconstructing the Record After the Fact

A poorly documented project may still be able to support a claim. When the schedule itself can’t be trusted, the pre-loss trajectory can often still be reconstructed from other contemporaneous sources, including payroll and labor records, procurement and delivery logs, daily reports, superintendent logs, RFIs, submittal tracking, meeting minutes and correspondence. While none of these records were intended to function as a schedule, each provides a snapshot of what was occurring on the project at a particular point of time.

The difficulty lies in assembling individual snapshots into a coherent timeline and comparing that timeline to the revised schedule. For example, daily reports and labor records may show that a crew wasn’t mobilized on an activity until three weeks after the scheduled start date. That’s a data point the schedule alone would never reveal. If procurement records show a critical material arrived late, but the schedule was never adjusted to reflect it, that gap tells you something about how reliable the schedule’s forward-looking dates were. By systematically cross-referencing these contemporaneous records against one another and against the schedule, it is possible to build an independent view of project progress—one that either supports the pre-loss completion date the schedule shows or reveals that the date needs to be adjusted.

This is where experience with how construction projects are actually documented in the field matters. Knowing what records typically exist on a given type of project, where they’re likely to be found and how to read them against each other is what separates a defensible reconstruction from guesswork. It’s slower and more expensive than pulling a date off an updated schedule, and it rarely produces the same precision, but it’s the difference between a claim grounded in verifiable project reality and one grounded in whatever the schedule happens to say, whether factual or not.

The Takeaway

Before calculating the duration of a delay or determining which activities were affected by the loss, the underlying project documentation should be thoroughly evaluated on its own merits. The pre-loss completion date is only as reliable as the records supporting it. Regardless of project’s size or complexity, that record should be tested, not assumed.