Construction Project Management Editing and Proofreading Services

Three years later, in a room with barristers in it, somebody reads the minutes of a progress meeting held on a wet Tuesday. What was said about the piling rig, whether the architect promised drawings by the fourteenth, whether the delay was mentioned at all — the answers are in that document or they are nowhere, because everybody's memory of a Tuesday three years ago is a reconstruction of what they now need to be true.

We edit what construction project managers produce — progress and site meeting minutes, action and decision logs, project execution and information plans, programme narratives and progress reports, change and instruction records, risk and opportunity registers, handover and commissioning plans, consultant and subcontractor briefing documents, client reporting and board papers, close-out and lessons learned reports, and correspondence recording agreements reached on site. Our editors work on the record that has to stand three years later.

Site meeting minutes are the contemporaneous record on which most construction disputes turn, and their weakness is recording discussion rather than commitments. A minute reading "the design team confirmed drawings would be issued shortly" contains a subject who cannot be identified, an obligation with no date, and an adverb doing the work of a deadline. We work through these so every commitment is recorded as a named person, a specific deliverable and a date, since this is the only form in which a minute is useful to anybody afterwards; so what was reported is separated from what was agreed, given that a contractor stating a position and the meeting accepting it are different events and minutes routinely blur them; so anything that was raised and not resolved is recorded as unresolved with who is to resolve it, because the absence of a matter from the minutes will later be argued as evidence it was never raised; so disagreements are minuted as disagreements rather than smoothed, as a minute recording consensus that did not exist is worse than no minute; so the status of previous actions is carried forward with dates rather than marked ongoing; and so the circulation and the objection period are stated, since minutes not objected to become the agreed record. Minutes written this way are read out in support of whoever wrote them.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including project records, correspondence and client information. We are editors rather than project managers, contract administrators or legal advisers, and we offer no view on entitlement, programme or responsibility. What we can do is make the record say what actually happened.