What to do when a document changes on the day of completion

October 6, 2026

When a deed or contract is amended after you've reviewed it, your earlier checks no longer apply. It doesn't matter how thorough they were: if the text has changed, what you checked is not what will be signed.

That's the starting point. What follows is the process for not completing on a document you haven't, in practice, reviewed.

Why last-minute changes are a specific risk

A last-minute change arrives under pressure. The parties are coordinated, the exchange or completion is expected, and unwinding it now carries costs and complications. In that environment, the natural temptation is to assume the change is minor and press on.

The risk isn't just the change itself. Any amendment can have knock-on effects in parts of the document that weren't edited but are now inconsistent. A revised date in one clause can make a reference to time periods two pages later meaningless. A corrected price may no longer match the breakdown in a schedule. A party added or removed may mean the defined terms now point to the wrong person.

Your earlier review didn't catch any of that, because it couldn't have.

What to do as soon as you're told something has changed

The first step is to ask for the new version before confirming you can proceed. Don't assume it will be sent automatically — in many cases, someone takes the view that the change is too small to warrant a fresh review. You need to ask for it explicitly.

Once you have it:

Identify exactly what changed. Don't rely on a verbal summary. If possible, compare the two versions side by side, section by section or clause by clause.

Read the change in context. Once you've found what changed, read the clauses around it and any that cross-reference it. Ask yourself whether the change creates an inconsistency with anything else in the deed.

Re-check the elements most likely to be knocked out of alignment. Regardless of what was formally amended, certain fields tend to go out of sync when any part of a document changes:

Party details: names, ID numbers, and the capacity in which they're acting.
Dates: effective dates, expiry dates, time periods.
Figures: price, area, shares, payment schedules.
Cross-references: clauses, schedules, or annexures cited by number elsewhere in the deed.

Don't proceed on a version you haven't reviewed. If time hasn't allowed you to carry out this check, don't proceed. The pressure of the moment is not a defence if an error surfaces later.

How to record the review of an amended version

Your matter file needs to reflect that there was an amendment and that you checked it. This serves two purposes: it protects you, and it gives any future reader a clear picture of what happened.

In practice, this means:

Keep both versions in the file, clearly identified. Don't overwrite the version you originally reviewed. If your system doesn't support versioning, label them — by date, by version number, or with labels like "version reviewed" and "executed version".

Note what you checked. You don't need a lengthy report. A brief note stating what you were told had changed, what you verified yourself, and that you confirmed the final version before proceeding is sufficient.

Record the time if the margin was tight. If the review happened with very little time before signing, note that too. Not as an excuse, but because the file should be an accurate record of what actually happened.

When adjourning is the right call

Some changes arrive too late to be reviewed properly. If the amendment lands minutes before completion, if it affects core terms, or if you can't get a clean copy to compare against, adjourning is the correct decision.

The test worth keeping in mind: are you reviewing the document, or are you proceeding because the process has momentum and it feels too late to stop? If it's the latter, the right moment to pause is before completion, not after.

An adjournment for document review reasons is rarely welcome at the time. But it is considerably easier to manage than completing on a deed that contained an error no one caught.

If you'd like support with document review and verification in your practice, VerifyAct has tools built for that.