When a project manager resigns during a construction claim, the documents stay and the witness goes. In the notice period, counsel should issue a hold naming the departing manager, record what they heard in an interview with counsel, write a paid cooperation term into the separation agreement, and brief the successor to inherit the record, never to rewrite it.

The hearing is set for spring. The project manager resigned in October. Both dates are hypothetical. What happens between them decides whether a construction claim can still be proven. Every daily report, RFI and change order log the manager wrote stays on the server. The one person who heard the owner’s representative say “go ahead, the paperwork can follow” starts a new job across town on Monday.

Two weeks of notice is enough to keep that claim provable, if somebody treats the resignation as an evidence event and runs the steps in order. The easy mistake is the right steps in the wrong sequence: the exit interview before the hold notice, the laptop reimaged before anyone collected it.

What does a construction claim lose when the project manager resigns?

It loses its witness, not its paperwork. Daily reports, RFIs and the change order log stay in the files, where a records custodian can authenticate them. What leaves is what the project manager heard and never wrote down, and on a verbal-instruction claim that is the entitlement.

Construction runs on verbal instruction. A superintendent or an owner’s representative says go ahead, the crew builds it, and the change paperwork arrives weeks later, if it arrives at all. Whoever gave the instruction carries none of the risk. The burden lands on the party that must later show what was said, and a resignation moves it one step further: from the person who heard the words to people who did not.

Federal contracts write that risk into the clauses. Under the Changes clause at FAR 52.243-4, an oral order from the contracting officer counts as a change only if the contractor gives written notice stating the date, circumstances and source of the order, and, defective specifications aside, no adjustment covers costs incurred more than 20 days before that notice. The site conditions clause wants written notice promptly and before the conditions are disturbed. Both assume that the person who saw it also wrote it down in time.

The evidence rules draw the same line from the other end. A daily report made at or near the time by someone with knowledge, as a regular practice, can come in as a business record under Rule 803(6) on a custodian’s testimony. A witness, by contrast, may testify only about what they personally know. The successor can authenticate the March reports. The successor cannot say what the owner’s representative said in March.

RecordWhat stays in the filesWhat leaves with the project manager
Daily reportsThe entries as writtenWhy the entry was thin on the day that mattered
RFIsThe question and the written answerThe phone call that came before the RFI
Change order logStatus, dates and pricingWhich changes were directed verbally, and by whom
Schedule updatesEach update as issuedWhy the logic changed between two updates
Texts and photosWhatever reached a company systemThe personal phone, unless someone collects it

A scheduling manager who kept the updates can often explain why the logic moved, and a dedicated claims manager owns much of the record. Neither was in the trailer when the instruction was given. And the files will outlast the manager by years, under clocks that do not care who is still on the payroll.

Which clocks keep running after the project manager leaves?

All of them. A federal contractor has six years from accrual to submit a claim, keeps project records for three years after final payment and longer while a claim is open, and keeps working while the dispute runs. None of those clocks stops for a resignation.

The Disputes clause sets the six-year window, requires a contracting officer to decide a claim of $100,000 or less within 60 days of a written request, and requires the contractor to proceed diligently with the work pending final resolution. FAR 4.703 sets the retention baseline of three years after final payment, and the records clause keeps records relating to claims available until those claims are finally resolved. After a final decision, FAR 33.211 gives the contractor 90 days to appeal to a board of contract appeals or 12 months to file in the Court of Federal Claims.

Put the long clocks on one scale. In months, the contractor has 72 to submit the claim after it accrues, keeps records for 36 after final payment, and has 12 to sue after a final decision. Each is measured in years. A project manager’s notice period is measured in days.

Federal construction claim clocks, in months Bar chart, Federal construction claim clocks, in months: Claim submission window 72 months, Records kept after payment 36 months, Court of Federal Claims 12 months. Federal construction claim clocks, in months A federal claim can be submitted up to 72 months after it accrues, so the people who hold its factsneed to stay reachable for years. 0 months 25 months 50 months 75 months 100 months Claim submission window 72 months Records kept after payment 36 months Court of Federal Claims 12 months Source: FAR 52.233-1, 4.703 and 33.211
A federal claim can be submitted up to 72 months after it accrues, so the people who hold its facts need to stay reachable for years.

People move faster than that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS survey counted 251,000 open construction jobs, seasonally adjusted, in August 2026, up from 213,000 a year earlier, and construction quits ran at 1.8 percent of employment that month, the same rate as a year before. A claim measured in years is being proven by a workforce that changes every month.

Private commercial building forms set their own notice windows, generally counted in days. Public owners need proof too: on a federal-aid highway job, a state DOT seeking federal participation in a claim award or settlement must set out the legal basis, cost data and supporting facts in writing, under 23 CFR 635.124. A claim on an interchange in Texas meets an owner building its own file. The work that decides whether the contractor can answer it happens in the two weeks before the last day.

How should counsel run the departure during a construction claim?

In five steps, in this order. Issue a hold naming the departing project manager, capture what they know in an interview with counsel before the last day, write a paid cooperation term into the separation agreement, brief the successor to inherit the record, and run the successor search quietly.

The order matters as much as the steps. The hold comes first because the interview will point at documents, and those documents need to still exist when counsel goes looking.

1. A hold that names the person

A hold notice addressed to “the project team” misses what this departure puts at risk: the manager’s personal phone, the notebook in the truck, the photos that never reached the project folder. Under Rule 37(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a court can act when electronically stored information that should have been preserved is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps, and where the party meant to deprive the other side of it, the court may presume the lost information was unfavorable. FAR 4.703 separately bars a federal contractor from deleting or writing over computer data during the retention period. Collect the laptop and phone before IT reimages them.

2. An interview before the last day

Counsel, not the successor, should walk the departing manager through every open issue while they are still on the payroll: each disputed instruction by date, circumstances and source, the three facts the Changes clause asks for. The memo is not a business record, because it was prepared for the dispute. Its job is narrower: to fix the memory before a new job overwrites it, and to show counsel which documents prove what the manager remembers. Collect a personal email, a phone number and a home address too, since Rule 26(a)(1) requires a party to disclose each individual with discoverable information it may use to support its claims, with an address and telephone number if known.

3. A cooperation term that pays for time

A cooperation term in the separation agreement should commit the manager to interviews, document review, deposition and hearing attendance, paid at a stated hourly figure plus travel. Section 201(d) of Title 18 of the US Code permits paying a witness the reasonable cost of travel and subsistence and the reasonable value of time lost in attendance. Payment tied to the content of testimony, or to the outcome, does not belong in the agreement.

One defensible anchor for the hourly figure is final salary. Construction managers earned a median of $114,990 in May 2025 by the BLS count, and the 75th percentile was $151,640: about $55 and $73 an hour over a 2,080-hour year. The figures are our illustration, not a study.

Distance is the other reason to act early. Under Rule 45(c), a subpoena can generally compel attendance only within 100 miles of where the person lives, works or regularly does business, though a deposition can be used at trial when the witness is more than 100 miles away. A manager relocating from Atlanta to Dallas is a reason to take testimony early.

4. A successor briefed to inherit, not to author

The replacement project manager will be asked about events they never saw. If the other side notices a company deposition under Rule 30(b)(6), the designee must testify about information known or reasonably available to the organization, and the successor is an obvious choice. Prepare them from the documents and the departing manager’s interview, and put two lines in their first-week brief:

  • Never annotate or tidy a past daily report, log entry or schedule update. A dated note explains; a changed entry impeaches.
  • Keep serving notice on new changes. The work continues while the claim runs, and every new verbal instruction starts a fresh clock under the same clauses.

5. A successor search that does not announce itself

An advertisement for the seat is a public notice that the disputed job’s main witness has gone. Selah Talent Partners treats the successor search on a disputed job as confidential executive search for mandates that cannot be publicly posted, with the brief written around the claim as well as the work. The senior project manager page describes the seat; a disputed job adds one requirement, comfort inheriting a record someone else wrote without improving it. If the contract names the manager, a key personnel clause adds a notice duty to the owner. Not every departure needs all five steps, though, and some need a different lawyer’s playbook entirely.

Where this sequence does not fit

The departure steps above assume a live dispute, a cooperative departure and counsel already engaged. Four situations sit outside them:

  • A claim settled and released. An ordinary handover of the kind described for resigning mid-project covers the departure.
  • A job with no dispute in prospect. The hold exists because litigation is reasonably anticipated. Without that, a thorough handover is the right tool.
  • An adverse departure. A manager leaving because of the dispute, or likely to testify against the contractor, needs counsel’s own strategy, and a cooperation term cannot buy silence.
  • Owner-side staff. An agency’s resident engineer answers to the agency’s own records and ethics rules, not to a contractor’s separation agreement.

Selah Talent Partners is a search firm and not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Each step is a question for the counsel who knows the contract, the forum and the jurisdiction.

What cannot be rebuilt once the project manager is gone?

The instruction itself, if nobody wrote it down. Documents can be found, authenticated and explained by a successor. A conversation in a site trailer exists only in the memories of the people who were in it, and once one of them has left, only the other side’s version remains.

Silence in the record does not stay neutral, either. Under Rule 803(7), evidence that a matter is missing from a regularly kept record can be admitted to prove the matter did not happen. A daily report that logs weather, crew counts and deliveries every day of March, and says nothing about an instruction to resequence the work, can be read as proof that no instruction was given. The contractor’s own discipline about recording weather and crew counts becomes evidence against its claim.

Boards read paper first. At the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals, Board Rule 4 at 48 CFR 6101.4 has the government file, within 30 days of docketing, every document relevant to the appeal, including witness statements, internal memoranda, reports and notes. A manager’s recollection enters that file only as a statement or a transcript, and only if someone took one before the manager left.

A resignation during a construction claim is an evidence event that arrives through HR. The notice period is the last time the instruction can be captured from the person who heard it, at the cost of an afternoon with counsel. After the last day, the same information costs a subpoena, travel, a witness answering to a new employer, and a memory that has had months to soften.

Five questions for an open claim file this week

Run them against any open claim file before anyone hands in a notice:

  • For each disputed instruction, can the file name who gave it, when and where?
  • Does the hold notice name individual people and their personal devices, or only the project?
  • Is there a current home address and personal phone number for every likely witness?
  • Is a cooperation term drafted and ready for a separation agreement?
  • Does the successor’s brief forbid editing a past daily report?

Come spring, the board will read what the project manager wrote and what the project manager signed, and it will hear nothing of what the project manager heard, because nobody preserved it.

Sources and further reading