FIDIC

Global Claims Under FIDIC — Threshold, Risk, and Defensibility

Global claims present total cost overrun as a single claim flowing from multiple employer events. They are legally available but evidentially demanding — and failure to meet the threshold results in complete rejection, not partial recovery.

6 min read · Updated 23/05/2026

In this article

1. When Global Claims Are Necessary
2. The Evidential Threshold
3. Disaggregation — The First Step
4. The Risk of Rejection
5. Building a Defensible Global Claim
6. Alternatives to Global Claims

Key takeaway

Global claims are a last resort, not a claims strategy. They succeed only where disaggregation is genuinely impossible and the entire loss flows from the employer’s qualifying events. Where the contractor cannot establish this threshold with strong evidence, the claim fails entirely — there is no partial recovery.

1. When Global Claims Are Necessary

Global claims arise when a FIDIC project suffers extensive employer-caused delay and disruption, and the contractor’s costs — across multiple cost elements, over multiple periods, involving multiple activities — are so thoroughly intertwined that segregating individual cost to individual event is not practically possible.

The reality on many disrupted projects is that every week on site is affected by multiple overlapping events. Productivity losses bleed across activities. Cost decisions made early in response to one delay event turn out to have consequences throughout the project. The total financial impact is real and significant — but its precise decomposition is elusive.

The global claim is the response: present the total cost overrun as a consequence of the totality of the employer’s defaults, rather than attempting to attribute specific losses to specific events.

2. The Evidential Threshold

The threshold for a successful global claim was set by the Scottish Court of Session in John Doyle Construction Ltd v Laing Management (Scotland) Ltd [2004] BLR 295. The court held that a global claim is permissible only where disaggregation is genuinely impossible, not where it is merely inconvenient.

Four conditions must be satisfied:

• Every employer-caused qualifying event must be proven — not all events need be quantified separately, but they must be shown to have occurred
• The entire loss must flow from those qualifying events — no material contribution from contractor-caused factors
• Disaggregation must be genuinely impossible — the contractor must establish why separating costs by event cannot be done
• The claim must be founded on strong, contemporaneous evidence — not reconstruction or assertion

The English Technology and Construction Court took a more pragmatic approach in Walter Lilly & Company Ltd v Mackay [2012] EWHC 1773 (TCC), holding that where the employer’s events are well-established and the contractor’s own defaults are minimal, a tribunal may assess the global loss on a broad-brush basis without requiring precise mathematical attribution of each element.

3. Disaggregation — The First Step

Before presenting a global claim, the contractor should attempt disaggregation. Identify every cost element that can be attributed to a specific event: variations with defined costs; extension of time periods with identified delays; and disruption to specific activities with measurable productivity loss.

Only the costs that genuinely resist disaggregation — residual losses that cannot be attributed to any specific event without conjecture — should be presented as global. The contractor that attempts this discipline strengthens its claim significantly: it demonstrates that the global component is genuinely residual, not a convenient shortcut.

The claim should present: (1) disaggregated costs by event, with their evidential basis; (2) the residual global component; and (3) an explanation of why the residual cannot be further disaggregated. This structure is far more defensible than a pure global claim.

4. The Risk of Rejection

The defining characteristic of a global claim is that it is all-or-nothing. If the tribunal rejects it, the contractor recovers nothing — not even on a broad-brush basis. The risk is that a single evidential weakness — one unproven event, or one undisputed contribution from contractor-caused delay — can result in complete rejection.

Example: A contractor presents a global claim of AED 5 million, attributing it to six employer-caused events. The tribunal accepts five events but finds that the sixth event was substantially caused by the contractor’s own default. Because the contractor cannot disaggregate the loss (that is the nature of the global claim), and because one event fails, the entire claim is rejected. The contractor recovers nothing.

This all-or-nothing outcome is why global claims are a legal strategy of last resort. The contractor that relies on them without meeting the strict threshold does not receive a discounted award — it receives a dismissal.

5. Building a Defensible Global Claim

If a global claim is genuinely necessary, build it on maximum contemporaneous evidence. The as-built programme, contemporary cost records, site diaries, meeting minutes, and correspondence all provide the factual foundation. These records create the history of what happened on the project — and allow the tribunal to assess the claim against the actual facts, not on assertion.

Present the claim with: (1) a detailed narrative of the project history and the events that caused disruption; (2) a programme-based analysis showing the critical path impact of each event; (3) an explanation of why costs cannot be further disaggregated; (4) contemporaneous evidence supporting each stated event; and (5) a calculation of the global loss amount, supported by actual cost records.

Acknowledge and exclude any contractor-caused contribution — do not hope the tribunal will overlook it. The transparency strengthens the claim: it shows that the contractor understands the boundaries and is presenting the genuinely residual loss.

6. Alternatives to Global Claims

In many cases, an alternative to the global claim is available and preferable: the broad-brush assessment. Rather than presenting a single global figure, present disaggregated claims to the extent possible, and for the residual, invite the tribunal to make a broad assessment of the residual loss based on the strength of the evidence of employer-caused events and their probable cost consequences.

This approach — used in Walter Lilly and affirmed in subsequent decisions — allows the tribunal discretion to assess a reasonable residual loss on a broad basis, without requiring the contractor to prove the claim to the level of mathematical precision. The outcome is more nuanced than an all-or-nothing global claim, and significantly more defensible.

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