We kept almost no records. Is the claim dead?

Not necessarily dead, but smaller, harder and shrinking by the month. Start with what can be rebuilt honestly. Projects shed records into systems nobody thinks of as claim evidence: emails and attachments carry dates and admissions, delivery tickets and invoices prove materials arriving against a timeline, payroll and allocation data prove who was on site and for how long, drawing registers and revision dates prove when information arrived, phone photos carry their own dates, and third parties, weather services, plant hire firms, crane and gate logs, kept records with no stake in your argument. A claim reassembled from these, openly presented as a reconstruction anchored to documents that existed at the time, can still be good, and statements from the people who were there help most when taken early, dated honestly rather than dressed up as site records. Now the harder half: whatever the contract made conditional on notices is a separate question from proof. A time-barred notification stays time-barred however well you later evidence the event, which is why the answer to a thin file is never to wait. Rescue what exists, take the statements now, and put the record routine right today, because the claim you can still prove is the one you stop losing evidence for this morning.

Take a fit-out contractor reaching a final account with a large disruption loss and almost nothing behind it: no diary worth the name, no registers, foremen scattered to other jobs. The rebuild starts from what survived. The email account gives up a trail of chased drawings with dates. The drawing issue sheets show information landing weeks after the areas needed it. Payroll shows the labour peak held through the standing time, and delivery tickets show materials arriving to programme and then waiting. Two foremen give statements in the same fortnight, dated as statements, tying the strands together. The claim that emerges is smaller than the loss everyone remembers, presented as the reconstruction it is, and settles respectably because every element rests on a document the other side can check. What stayed lost were the heads that needed notices served in their windows two years earlier. Half the money was rescued by six weeks of forensic work; the other half had been unrecoverable since the month the notices didn't go.