Evidence checklist
A dispute file is decided by what is in it and what order it is in. This is what belongs there, why each part earns its place, and where your trade's own list is.
What a file is for
Somebody who was not there has to follow it
A licensing board, a surety, an insurer, an attorney and a judge all arrive at your dispute the same way: with no knowledge of it and a limited amount of time. What each of them does next is decided by how quickly the file answers the questions they already have.
That is the whole standard. Not completeness for its own sake, and not volume. A file that a stranger can read in ten minutes and come out knowing what was promised, what was paid, and what is there instead.1
Four things that decide weight
Why one document settles an argument and another sits in the pile
A document beats a memory
Everything either of you remembers is contested by definition. A contract, an invoice and a dated photograph are the same on both sides of the argument, which is what lets a third party decide anything.
A date is half the document
An undated photograph of a leak proves a leak existed at an unknown time. The same photograph with a date proves it existed after the work was signed off, which is the fact in dispute.
What was promised is the yardstick
Almost every answer a business gives comes down to a claim that the result is normal. Normal was defined by the contract, the estimate and the specification you were sold, so those three decide what counts as a shortfall.
A change of scope is a document
The second most common answer is that the job changed on site. A change of scope is a change order. Where nobody can produce one, the original agreement is still the agreement.
The order
Five sections, most decisive first
The agreement, and everything that amended it
The signed contract, every estimate including superseded ones, and all change orders. This is the top of the file because it is what every later question is measured against.
The money
Every invoice and every proof of payment, with dates. Payment records are the one set a business cannot dispute, because its own bank produced half of them.
The work, dated
Photographs and video of what was done and what is wrong, with the date each was taken. Anything about to be closed up belongs here before it is, which is its own problem.
The conversation, in full
Messages, emails, letters and a dated note of every call. In full rather than the useful parts: a selected history is the first thing an opponent attacks, and gaps read as removals.
Anything a third party wrote
Permits, inspection results, a manufacturer's finding, an independent report. These carry weight the rest of the file cannot, because nobody in the dispute wrote them.
Your trade's own list
The documents a general checklist would not think of
Everything above is true of every dispute. Each trade also turns on documents specific to it, and those are on the trade’s own page, under “What to gather”.
Two harder cases
Work you cannot photograph, and a business that stops replying
Evidence that has been built over is its own problem, and documenting covered work is about what can still be done once it is too late. Where the record you need is a record of being ignored, a follow-up schedule is how attempts become evidence in their own right.2
Disclosures
- 1.Satisfy is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. This page describes how to assemble and order documents. It does not assess any dispute, state what any particular body requires, or say what a file proves.
- 2.What a licensing board, insurer or court will accept, and how long records must be kept, is set by each body and each state. Nothing on this page states a requirement or a period, because neither is the same in any two places.