A late solar plant in Minas Gerais: a construction arbitration run with Claira

Vale Claro Energia S.A., an invented owner, hired Construtora Ipê Ltda. under a lump-sum EPC contract to build a solar plant in the north of Minas Gerais. The plant reached commercial operation months after the contractual date. Vale Claro applied the contract's delay penalty, withheld the final payment and started an arbitration seated in São Paulo. Ipê answers that the owner handed over parts of the site late, was slow to secure the grid connection and changed the substation design midway through construction.

We act for Ipê. The file on the first morning holds the request for arbitration, the answer, the contract and the first procedural order with its timetable for document production. The contract requires the contractor to give written notice, within a fixed period, of any event that could extend the completion date, and the owner's case leans on that clause. The side that can date each event on site, month by month, and match it to Ipê's written notice is likely to prevail.

Ipê's own collection comes from the project director, the site manager, the planning engineer, the commercial manager and the site office's shared mailbox. It holds email and meeting minutes in Portuguese, a handwritten site diary scanned page by page, schedules saved as PDF and WhatsApp exports from the site team's phones, voice notes included. Correspondence with the owner's engineering adviser in Madrid is in Spanish.

Before anyone scans, the team would open early case assessment from the More menu. It counts the documents and file types, charts spikes and gaps over time, sets out the custodians by year and file type, picks out system files and suggests review segments and next steps. It works from metadata, reads no content and writes nothing to Discover. In this matter the gaps deserve the first call to the client, because a quiet month in the site manager's mailbox during the access dispute may mean a phone or a laptop that was never collected. The assessment downloads as a PDF for the file.

A Case Context built from the Arbitration template gives the review one written brief, with sections for the parties, the tribunal, the claims and the production rules. The team would select the request, the answer, the contract, the procedural order and the baseline schedule in Nuix Discover and click Generate from selection. Claira fills in the sections, ending each generated line with its source number, and lists missing information, such as the nicknames the site team uses for the owner's engineers, which an associate can answer with the Agent. A partner then approves it.

The review prompt runs in Multi-Code, which writes up to ten fields in one pass: the event date, a one-sentence account of the event, the people involved, the issue it bears on (site access, grid connection or design change) and whether it is or refers to a formal notice. The team would test it in single review on a benchmark set that includes diary pages and voice notes before running it at scale.

A bulk scan then runs the prompt across the collection. With Scan as left on Auto, Claira picks the mode for each document, so native email can be read as text, the scanned diary as images and the voice notes as audio. Image mode takes in layout, signatures and handwriting, which matters for a diary in which the site manager initialled each day's entry. Files over 50 MB fail with an error, so long recordings of site meetings would have to be split before the run.

Where the case admin has enabled background processing, the team can click Send to background, close the browser and receive an email when the task finishes. For the Spanish correspondence, the Translation workflow identifies each document's language and writes a short summary, which is enough to decide which letters need a qualified translator before any of them goes to the tribunal.

A first pass needs checking before anyone builds on it. Following the quality control steps in the objective coding workflow, the team would filter for fallback values, spot-check twenty to thirty documents across the document types and read the edge cases closely: diary pages that carry two dates, emails forwarding an older letter, voice notes that mention a day without a month. Documents with no identifiable date go to a reviewer.

Where associates have already coded some documents as notices, the QC Review workflow runs the same criterion over them so that disagreements rise to the top. Each bulk scan records the prompt version it ran, and comments on the task can explain why the prompt changed between runs. The Bulk task history report downloads as a PDF with the full prompt, the model and the comments, which helps if the owner later questions how the contractor's chronology was assembled.

With the fields filled, the team opens Insights, picks the chronology template from Quickstart, chooses the bulk task under Use AI results from and sets the format to Timeline. An Insight can read up to 25,000 documents from a bulk task, so the team might build one for each issue: site access, the grid connection and the substation design. Asked for a dated table, Claira returns one with citations that open the source documents.

Viewed as a timeline, the access chronology can set the diary entry recording crews standing idle at the northern parcel beside the planning engineer's WhatsApp message to the owner's site representative that week, and beside the formal letter that followed later. Where the diary and an email give different dates for the same event, the timeline shows that the sources disagree on the date, and the team can resolve it before the owner raises it. Clicking a person's chip filters the events to that person, which helps when preparing witness statements.

The chronology dates each problem Ipê raised and records the form it took. Whether a WhatsApp message or the minute of a site meeting satisfies the notice clause is a question of contract construction under Brazilian law, which includes the duty of good faith in article 422 of the Civil Code, and that call stays with counsel. So does the choice of which events to put to the delay expert as critical.

Document production is the other judgement. The Brazilian Arbitration Act allows the tribunal to order the evidence it considers necessary, at a party's request or on its own motion. Conversations that survive in Ipê's records only from Ipê's side point to targeted requests: the owner's internal correspondence on the grid connection, and its site representative's reports for the disputed months. Counsel decides how narrowly to frame them, knowing the tribunal will weigh each request against the issues in the case.

The finished Insight downloads as Word, Excel or PDF. The Word file keeps every script intact and suits drafting the facts section of the statement of claim. The Excel workbook puts each table on its own sheet with real dates and lists the source documents by ID, so an associate can match each row to an exhibit number. With a Log Field connected, each source document carries the Insight's reference, and a search on it in Nuix Discover brings back the whole set.

The approved Case Context downloads as Word or PDF with its source numbers, which gives the delay expert the same brief as the review team. The partner and the client then receive a chronology whose citations lead back to the documents, and the team can argue notice and critical delay from a record the client can check entry by entry.