The document problem behind construction disputes

Telamont started from an observation many people in construction share. When you trace a dispute back to where it began, you usually find project documents that no longer agree with each other, and nobody whose job it was to catch it.

Where problems start

A project is described across hundreds of documents, and they keep changing while the work goes on. The contract, the specifications, the drawings, the change orders and the subcontracts each make sense on their own. Problems start where they meet:

1. A drawing revision changes an assumption the specifications still rely on.
2. A change order moves a scope boundary that a subcontract still describes the old way.
3. A specification requirement never made it into the bid.

The industry already knows the causes

Arcadis publishes an annual report on the construction disputes its contract solutions team handles. The leading causes barely change from one edition to the next:

• Gaps in contract administration
• Claims that are poorly prepared or not backed by evidence
• A party that does not understand or does not meet its obligations
• Errors and omissions in the contract documents, the top cause in six of nine years

All four lead to the same place: documents and obligations that drifted apart without anyone seeing it in time.

The amounts are large. The 2025 edition puts the average US dispute at $60.1 million, with North American disputes taking about 12.5 months to resolve. Those figures come from large projects that call in a global firm, but the mechanism is the same on a $40 million job, with less margin to absorb it.

Why the problem stayed

In 2014, the same firm's head of contract solutions summed up the fix: better contract administration, more rigorous documentation and a proactive approach to risk. That is still the advice today, and average dispute values have roughly doubled since.

Following it means keeping every project document in view for the full length of the work, and re-checking all of them each time something new arrives. On an eighteen-month job, that means comparing thousands of pages, again and again. Even the most rigorous teams can't do that by hand on top of running the work, so the industry learned to manage disputes after the fact instead of preventing them.

Disputes became a cost of doing business, because checking everything by hand was never realistic.

What changed, and what we built

Recent advances in artificial intelligence changed what is possible. For the first time, a system can analyze thousands of pages of construction documents and compare them continuously. We built Telamont on those advances and specialized it for construction. That is what finally makes the 2014 advice possible to follow.

Telamont analyzes the whole project together (contract, specifications, drawings, change orders and subcontracts) and checks it again every time a new version arrives. Every risk it finds comes with its source, whether a clause, a specification section or a drawing, and the page that proves it.

We build construction judgment in with engineers, architects, construction lawyers and general contractors, who review what the system produces and tell us where it is wrong.

What it solves: your team sees technical, contractual and compliance risks while a decision can still fix them. A project should end on the quality of the work, on time and with the margin you planned.

Where we come from

Two backgrounds brought us here. Charles Goulet is the third generation of a construction family. His grandfather and father ran work on Quebec megaprojects, including the James Bay dams, and he saw enough projects end in disputes for it to feel normal.

William Gagnon, co-founder and CTO, comes from the AI side, applying technology to the way manufacturers run their processes on the floor. The team around them brings technical experience from firms like WSP and AtkinsRéalis.