About CDIA
Why it exists
CDIA is developed by CDIA Technologies Limited for construction-project and dispute workflows. Its design and testing are led by practitioners: the company’s founder, Ian Mackrell, has decades of experience as a construction claims consultant, delay analyst and expert witness, and every workflow in CDIA is tested against that kind of work before release.
Anyone who has prepared or answered a claim knows the shape of the problem. The records run to thousands of documents: letters, emails, minutes, diaries, applications, notices, reports and the contract. The question is never whether something can be found. It is whether the whole record has been considered, whether each statement can be traced to its source, and whether the reader can tell a contemporaneous record from a report written afterwards. Under cross-examination, those distinctions are the whole case.
General AI tools are extraordinarily capable and have made drafting faster. What they do not provide on their own is the evidence workflow that work under challenge needs: a defined evidence scope, a review of what will be used before anything is written, a visible distinction between contemporaneous records and later accounts, and citations that are checked and open at the source.
CDIA was built to do the part around the model properly. You draw the evidence boundary and CDIA keeps to it. You see the evidence before any answer is written. Records, reports and contract wording stay labelled. CDIA issues and checks citations and gives source locations where it holds them, so you can open the source and check each finding yourself. And you choose whether the AI reasoning runs through your own account with a leading provider or entirely on your own machine.
What CDIA is, and is not
CDIA is an evidence investigation workspace for construction and dispute professionals: claims consultants, delay and quantum experts, commercial managers, quantity surveyors, contract managers, project managers, planners, expert witnesses and solicitors.
It is not delay-analysis or planning software, and it does not calculate entitlement. It is not a document management system. It does not give legal advice and it never decides liability, quantum or entitlement. It shows what the evidence says, keeps AI analysis visibly separate from source fact, and leaves the judgement where it belongs.
How it is built
CDIA is a Windows desktop application. Documents are stored and prepared on your computer. With Private AI nothing leaves the machine. With Cloud AI, relevant prepared evidence may be sent to your provider while CDIA prepares and reads material for your question, as well as when it writes the answer; the Investigation Review then controls what goes into the final answer. Version 3 added Ask CDIA with the Investigation Review, Advice, Draft with Word export, built-in text recognition for scanned PDFs, Outlook email import, and the choice of Cloud AI or Private AI.
Every claim on this website is checked against the User Manual, which describes the product as shipped, including its limits.
The company
CDIA Technologies Limited is registered in England and Wales, company number 17214104, with its registered office at Top Pen Y Parc Farm, Halkyn, Flintshire, CH8 8DH.
Early Adopter rate
The first 100 subscribers pay £19.99 a month, locked for as long as they stay continuously subscribed. In return we ask for honest feedback. What early adopters ask CDIA, and where it falls short, decides what gets built next.