Building Legally Robust FIDIC 2017 E-Claim Infrastructures: Contract Data Design, Platform Governance, and Enforcement of Time Bars

Abstract

Construction projects increasingly rely on email and project portals to administer claims, yet the International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC) makes timely and properly served notices a condition precedent to entitlement. The mismatch between digital practice and formal notice regimes creates avoidable forfeitures and satellite disputes about dispatch, receipt, identity, and system reliability. Existing scholarship addresses FIDIC time bars, electronic transactions, and information-security governance largely in isolation. This article integrates those strands to propose a legally robust e-claims infrastructure. The analysis synthesizes multiple clauses with the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Model Law on Electronic Commerce, electronic identification, authentication and trust services (eIDAS) concepts of trusted time stamps and electronic registered delivery (used as functional benchmarks), and selected series controls. The framework is stress-tested doctrinally against both purposive and strict-compliance authorities, and against published evidence of uneven digital maturity and human-factor failure modes in digital systems. Outputs include model contract data entries, an electronic notice clause, a portal protocol, and a compliance checklist designed to shift disputes from technical defects in notice to the merits of claims. The analysis is confined to a specific standard and common-law approaches to time bars; jurisdiction-specific mandatory formalities and confidential arbitral practice require case-by-case assessment.