Terms of Use

The QLD Subcontract Risk Scanner (the "Scanner") and Adjudicate Pro, our payment dispute assessment tool ("Adjudicate Pro"), together and individually the "Tool", are operated by The Construction Contracts Co. ("TCCC", "we", "us", "our"), a trading name. By accessing or using the Tool, you ("you", "the user") agree to these Terms of Use. If you do not agree, do not use the Tool.

Unless a section says otherwise, everything in these Terms applies to both the Scanner and Adjudicate Pro. Where the two differ (mainly in what you upload and how long we keep it), the section says so.

Before running a scan or an assessment you must tick the box confirming you have read and agree to these Terms, our Privacy Policy, and our Disclaimer. Ticking that box and uploading a document (or submitting pasted text) forms an agreement between you and us on these Terms.

If you are using the Tool on behalf of a business, you confirm you are authorised to accept these Terms for that business. If you do not agree with them, do not upload anything.

The Scanner uses artificial intelligence to read uploaded subcontract documents and produce a written report identifying clauses that may depart from generally observed Queensland market norms or commercial practice.

Adjudicate Pro uses artificial intelligence to read uploaded dispute documents, pasted correspondence, and your questionnaire answers, and to produce a written assessment of a construction payment dispute, including an estimated likelihood of success, an analysis of strengths and weaknesses, the other party's likely arguments, suggested next steps, indicative cost and timeline estimates, and in some cases a draft letter.

Every report and assessment is general information only. It is not, and is not intended to be, legal advice, financial advice, accounting advice, or any other form of professional advice. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified construction lawyer, accountant, or commercial advisor familiar with your specific circumstances.

A likelihood percentage produced by Adjudicate Pro is a commercial estimate generated by an AI system from the material you provided. It is not a prediction, not a probability derived from decided cases, and not a guarantee of any outcome. Real outcomes depend on facts, evidence, and procedure that no automated assessment can fully capture.

You should not act, or refrain from acting, on the basis of any content in a report or assessment without obtaining appropriate professional advice. Any decisions you make about a subcontract, or about whether to pursue, negotiate, settle, adjudicate, litigate, or abandon a claim or dispute, are your own decisions, made at your own risk.

Reports and assessments are produced by an automated artificial intelligence system. AI systems can:

• misinterpret clauses, claims, or correspondence;
• miss clauses, documents, or issues entirely;
• produce factually incorrect statements, including incorrect statements about legislation, time limits, and procedure;
• misjudge the strength of a position or the likelihood of an outcome;
• generate analysis that does not apply to your specific contract, dispute, or circumstances; and
• produce inconsistent results between runs.

We do not warrant that any report or assessment is accurate, complete, current, fit for any particular purpose, or free of errors. You must independently verify any information in it before relying on it.

Security of payment legislation imposes strict time limits. Missing a statutory deadline can permanently extinguish rights that would otherwise have existed. Any statement in an assessment about a deadline, a time bar, a notice period, or the procedure for adjudication is general information that may be wrong, incomplete, or out of date, and must be independently verified (against the current legislation and with appropriate professional advice) before you act on it or allow a date to pass in reliance on it.

Where an assessment names an adjudication registry, nominating authority, or other body, that information is provided for convenience only. We do not warrant that it is current, and we are not affiliated with, and do not act for, any such body.

Where an assessment includes a draft letter or other draft communication, it is a template only. If you choose to adapt and send it, the communication is yours, sent by you, in your name, on your own judgement. You are responsible for checking every statement, figure, date, and legal reference in it before it is sent. We are not the author of your correspondence and accept no responsibility for it or for any consequence of sending it.

The Scanner and Adjudicate Pro are designed to refer to contracting parties using generic terms such as "the principal", "the head contractor", or "the builder", regardless of any party names appearing in the uploaded material. Their reports and assessments do not, and are not intended to, make any statement about, judgement of, or reference to any specific named entity or person. Any apparent reference to a specific entity is unintended and should be disregarded.

Builder Check and Builder Watch are different. At your request they look up a business or company you name in public registers and tell you what those registers say. Everything they report is drawn from, and attributed to, a public register published by a government body or regulator: the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) company and business names datasets published on data.gov.au, the Queensland Building and Construction Commission (QBCC) register of licensed contractors published on data.qld.gov.au, and the Australian Business Register (ABN Lookup). Where a register has no open-data feed, the report gives you a link to run the search yourself on the official site.

A Builder Check report, a Builder Watch alert and the entity list shown when you type a name are reproductions of public-register entries as published on the date shown. They are not, and must not be taken as, an assessment, opinion, rating, score, recommendation or statement by us about any entity's solvency, creditworthiness, financial position, reputation, conduct, licensing or suitability, and they are not a credit report or credit reporting service. Where the report draws attention to a register entry (for example a company status, a registration date or a licence category) it is only pointing out what the register says; the decision about what, if anything, that means for your job is yours.

Public registers can be incomplete, out of date, contain errors, or list entities with the same or similar names. We copy them as published and do not verify them. The name you type may match more than one entity, and the entity we show first is a best match, not a confirmation that it is the entity on your contract. You must confirm the ACN or ABN of the entity you are contracting with against your contract, purchase order or the official register before relying on any report or alert, and you must not rely on a report or alert as the sole basis for a decision to contract, extend credit, price, suspend work or take any other action.

Reports and alerts are provided for your own business use in deciding whether and how to contract with the entity concerned. You must not publish, republish or distribute a report or alert, or any statement based on one, as a statement about the entity concerned, and you are solely responsible for anything you say or do about an entity in reliance on them. Sections 3, 12, 13 and 14 apply to Builder Check and Builder Watch in full.

Builder Check and Builder Watch contain public sector information licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence (ASIC, Commonwealth of Australia) and the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (QBCC, State of Queensland), and ABN details from ABN Lookup. The Australian Government does not endorse this service.

Depending on the tool, you may upload subcontracts, payment claims, invoices, payment schedules, correspondence, photographs, and similar project documents, or paste the text of correspondence. Everything in this section applies equally to pasted text. Upload only material you are entitled to possess. By uploading, you confirm that:

• you lawfully hold the material, for example because you are a party to it, you sent or received it, or you were given it in the course of tendering for or performing the work;
• you have considered any confidentiality obligation that applies to it and have decided for yourself that running it through the Tool is appropriate; and
• you are not uploading it for an improper purpose, including to harm, disparage, or gain an unfair advantage over any other party.

We do not ask you to breach any obligation you owe to anyone, and nothing in the Tool or on this website should be read as advice or encouragement to do so. The decision to upload particular material is yours.

We handle everything you upload as confidential. We do not publish it, do not share it with any other user, do not disclose it to any other party to your contract or dispute, and do not use it to identify you or your business to anyone. Our obligations are set out in section 8 and in our Privacy Policy.

You remain responsible for the material you choose to upload.

We store the material you upload in private, access-controlled storage located in Sydney, Australia. It is never made publicly available and is never published or shared with any other user.

Scanner documents: we keep a subcontract uploaded to the Scanner for up to twelve (12) months from the date of the scan, after which it is permanently deleted. During that period we use it to generate your report, to improve the accuracy of the Tool, and to build de-identified market benchmarks, that is, aggregate statistics about what is and is not normal in Australian subcontracts, segmented by state. Benchmarks never identify you, your business, the document, or any party named in it.

Adjudicate Pro documents: dispute documents and pasted correspondence are more sensitive, so we keep them for a shorter period: up to one hundred and eighty (180) days from the date of the assessment, after which they are permanently deleted. During that period we use them to generate your assessment and to improve the accuracy of the Tool.

For both tools, we also retain a record of the event itself (your email address, file names and sizes, your questionnaire answers in the case of Adjudicate Pro, the IP address from which it was run, and a timestamp), together with the generated report or assessment, for the purposes and periods set out in our Privacy Policy.

You can ask us to delete your documents and your records at any time by emailing mat@theconstructioncontracts.co. We will action the request within seven (7) days.

So that we can operate and improve the Tool, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, copy, process, and analyse the material you upload, for the retention period described in section 8. This licence exists only to let us do the things described in these Terms.

That licence includes the right to derive structured commercial data from the material (for example, that a subcontract in a particular trade carried a payment term of 40 business days, or that a dispute of a particular type in a particular state involved an amount in a particular range and produced an assessment of a particular strength) and to retain and use that data indefinitely, including after the material itself is deleted, to produce market and dispute benchmarks and to improve the Tool.

That structured data describes the contract or the dispute, not you. It does not include your name, your business, or your email address, and it is not linked to you in anything we publish. For Scanner documents it does record details drawn from the face of the contract, which can include the trade, the project type, the contract value, and the name of the head contractor or principal named in it.

We publish benchmarks only in aggregate, drawn from many contracts and disputes. We do not publish, sell, or disclose the terms of any individual contract or the facts of any individual dispute, and we do not publish benchmarks that identify a party by name. Your material cannot be reconstructed from this data.

You keep ownership of your material. We claim no ownership of it, and this licence ends in respect of the material itself when it is deleted.

The Tool is free to use. Fair-use limits apply per email address and per network address so that the Tool stays available to everyone. We may change these limits at any time without notice. We may also restrict, suspend, or terminate access to the Tool for any user who, in our reasonable opinion, is misusing the Tool, attempting to circumvent use limits, or breaching these Terms.

All right, title, and interest in the Tool itself (the underlying prompts, system design, market benchmarks, and branding) remain with us.

The report or assessment we generate for you is yours to use in your business. You may keep it, print it, and share it with your own advisers, your insurer, your accountant, your lawyer, or the other party to the contract or dispute it concerns. You do not need our permission to forward it.

What you may not do is resell it, publish it as your own work, remove our branding from it, or use it as the basis of a competing product or service.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Tool is provided "as is" and "as available". We make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, including as to merchantability, fitness for purpose, accuracy, completeness, reliability, availability, or non-infringement. Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts, or modifies any consumer guarantee, right, or remedy that cannot lawfully be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law.

Where the Australian Consumer Law applies and we fail to meet a consumer guarantee, and the services are not of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic, or household use, our liability is limited, at our option, to supplying the services again, or to paying the cost of having them supplied again.

Otherwise, and to the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability to you arising out of or in connection with the Tool, any report or assessment, or these Terms (whether in contract, tort including negligence, statute, or otherwise) is limited to AUD $100. The Tool is supplied to you free of charge, and that is the basis on which this limit is set.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, consequential, special, incidental, or punitive loss or damage, including loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of business opportunity, loss of contract, loss of goodwill, loss of data, or loss of any claim, right, or remedy (including any right lost through the expiry of a statutory time limit), arising out of or in connection with your use of the Tool or any reliance on any report or assessment.

You indemnify us against all loss, damage, cost, expense, claim, action, or liability suffered or incurred by us, arising out of or in connection with: (a) your use of the Tool; (b) any material you upload, including any claim by another party that uploading it breached an obligation you owed them; (c) any breach by you of these Terms; (d) any decision you make in reliance on any report, alert or assessment, including a Builder Check report or Builder Watch alert, including any decision to commence, pursue, defend, settle, or abandon a claim, adjudication, or proceeding; or (e) any letter or other communication you send that is based on, or adapted from, a draft produced by the Tool.

This indemnity does not apply to the extent the loss was caused by our own breach of these Terms, our negligence, or our wilful misconduct.

These Terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia. You submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Queensland and the courts of appeal from them in respect of any dispute arising out of or in connection with these Terms or the Tool.

We may amend these Terms at any time by posting an updated version with a new "last updated" date. Amendments apply to scans and assessments you run after the change. Your continued use of the Tool after an amendment is taken as acceptance of the amended Terms.

Amendments do not apply retrospectively to material you have already uploaded. Whatever we told you about storage, retention, and use at the moment you uploaded it continues to govern that material, even if we later change these Terms.

Every completed report is emailed to the address you give us, and an assessment is emailed if you leave its email box ticked. You are responsible for the address you give us. Email is not a secure medium and we cannot control what happens to a message once it leaves our sending provider. To stop emails, reply to any email or contact mat@theconstructioncontracts.co.

We do not publish reports or assessments, and we do not generate public links to them. Anything you forward on is your decision.

We use industry-standard measures to protect uploaded material, including encrypted connections, private storage that is not readable without server-side credentials, and access controls. No system is completely secure, and we do not guarantee that uploaded material can never be accessed by an unauthorised person. If we become aware of a breach affecting your material or personal information, we will notify you and comply with our obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

A plain-English summary of where uploads are stored, who can access them, and how long they are kept is on our Security and data handling page.

The Tool is free and is provided on an as-available basis. We may limit, suspend, or withdraw it, in whole or in part, at any time and without notice. Because there is a finite daily budget for running the analysis, the Tool may tell you it is at capacity and ask you to come back later.

If any part of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, that part is severed and the rest continues to apply. A failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of it. These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and Disclaimer, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Tool.

For any questions about these Terms, contact us at mat@theconstructioncontracts.co.