Term" was extended by a one-line email amendment the agent classified as correspondence, not an amendment

TL;DR

Classify amendments by content, not by medium. A one-line email that says the term is extended is an amendment regardless of where it was written. Scan every document in the bundle, including emails, for operative amendment language, and route candidates to human confirmation instead of auto-dismissing them as correspondence. The agent gated on document type, so the extension never entered the amendment chain.

"Term" was extended by a one-line email amendment the agent classified as correspondence, not an amendment

Steps

1. Ingest emails and other informal documents into the bundle; do not filter them out at intake.

Expected: the one-line email is in the document set, not discarded

1. Run a content-based amendment classifier over every document: operative phrases like 'hereby amends', 'is extended through', 'effective as of', plus signature blocks.

Expected: the email matches "hereby extends the Term through [date]" and is flagged

1. Route every candidate amendment to a human confirmation queue; never auto-dismiss a match as correspondence.

Expected: zero candidate amendments are dismissed without a recorded decision

1. On confirmation, insert the email into the amendment chain with its effective date and rebuild downstream artifacts.

Expected: the "Term" extraction reflects the extended date

1. Log the classification decision per document: why it was or was not treated as an amendment.

Expected: an auditor can see the email was considered and confirmed

Use this when

• A term changed via email, letter, or other informal writing the agent ignored.
• The agent's amendment chain is missing documents that exist in the bundle.
• Intake filters drop non-PDF or non-traditional documents before classification.
• You are auditing completeness of the amendment chain.

Not for this skill when

• The email merely discusses a possible extension without operative language; that is correspondence.
• The bundle genuinely contains no informal amendments.
• The extension is documented in a formal amendment the agent already processed.
• You need a legal opinion on whether the email is enforceable as an amendment.

Variant phrasings

email amendment missed by contract review agent

agent classified amendment as correspondence

one-line email extended the term, agent ignored it

informal amendment not in the amendment chain

Why it happens

Intake pipelines sort documents by type early: PDFs go to the contract parser, emails go to the correspondence bucket, and the buckets never meet again. Amendment detection then runs only inside the contract bucket. The one-line email is legally operative but structurally an email, so it lands in the bucket that nobody checks for amendments. Medium-based routing is an efficiency shortcut that silently drops exactly the informal amendments real deals run on.

Edge cases

• The email thread discusses several possible extensions before settling on one. Only the email with operative language and signatures counts; discussion drafts stay correspondence.
• The email amendment is unsigned. Flag it as unconfirmed-operative and route to a human; do not silently include or exclude it.
• The extension is conditional ("extended if payment is received by..."). Record the condition alongside the new term date.
• Multiple emails each extend the term further. Chain them in effective-date order like formal amendments.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_T0nSFejQAP0y1uzbfD67NQ