What to check when a contract or deed arrives with handwritten corrections before signing
When a contract or deed reaches your desk carrying visible corrections — a crossing-out, a handwritten addition between the lines, a marginal note — your pre-completion review does not stop at the clean text. It starts where the corrections are.
The question is not whether the document is legally valid. That is for the fee earner to determine. The question for the pre-completion review is simpler: what exactly needs to be verified in a document that has been altered after it was typed?
Why corrections call for a separate review pass
A clean document is reviewed for its contents. A document with corrections requires an additional layer: you are reviewing the contents and the state of the document itself.
Any amendment made after the original draft breaks the linear history of the document. That does not make it a problem — but it does make it a point that needs attention. You need to understand what was changed, whether the change is properly acknowledged, and whether every copy of the document reflects the same alteration.
Three types of correction you will typically see
Crossings-out with substitute text. A word or figure has been struck through, and another written beside or above it. What to verify: the replacement text is legible and unambiguous, and the correction is acknowledged — typically by an initial or a marginal note from the relevant party.
Interlineations. A phrase or word has been added between the lines of the original text. What to verify: the interlineation belongs to the paragraph it appears in, and it is clear where in the sentence it sits.
Marginal notes. An amendment or clarification has been written outside the body of the text. What to verify: the note is called out somewhere in the body of the document, and it does not contradict the text it is meant to clarify.
In all three cases, the priority is the same: understand what the document now says, not what it said before.
Cross-checks before the document is signed off
The correction against the rest of the deed
Every correction affects at least one clause. The first check is whether the change has knock-on effects elsewhere in the document. If the purchase price has been amended, does the corrected figure appear consistently in every clause that mentions it? If a party's name has been altered, has it been altered throughout?
The frequent error is to review the correction in isolation — confirm that the amendment is clearly written, note it in the file, and move on without checking whether the same detail appears uncorrected somewhere else in the deed.
Multiple engrossments against one another
Where a deed is executed in more than one part — the norm for most conveyancing transactions and many commercial contracts — every engrossment must carry the same corrections. An amendment on one part and not the other is a discrepancy that needs to be resolved before the deed is dated, not after.
This check is easy to overlook when the pre-completion review is done on a single copy. It is worth building into your internal process an explicit step: when there are multiple engrossments, the corrections check includes comparing them against one another.
The engrossment against earlier drafts
If the matter file holds an earlier version of the document — a draft, a marked-up copy, an agreed form — the correction that appears in the engrossment should be traceable to an agreed change. Is there an email exchange or a file note that records the instruction?
Not every file will have a preceding draft. But when one exists, it is a useful point of comparison, and inconsistencies between the draft record and the final document are worth flagging.
Recording corrections in the matter file
When a pre-completion review finds corrections, the matter file should show that those corrections were reviewed. This does not require a detailed report. A brief file note — what corrections were found, where in the deed, what was verified — is enough.
If the correction was consistent with the rest of the document and properly acknowledged, the note says so. If the correction prompted a query to the fee earner, the note records both the query and the response.
The practical value is clear: if anyone returns to the file after the deed completes, they can reconstruct what was checked and why the document was cleared for signing.
When to escalate
Not every correction found during a pre-completion review needs to go to the fee earner. A useful working criterion: if the correction touches a substantive term — the price, a party's identity, the property description, payment dates — report it to the responsible fee earner before proceeding.
If the correction is typographical — a repeated word struck out, a spelling error corrected — and it does not affect the substance of the deed, it can be recorded in the file note without interrupting the review.
In practice, what gets escalated and what does not should be set out in your internal process, not decided case by case. An agreed threshold means the reviewer is not making a judgment call each time, and the fee earner is not being copied on every minor correction.
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