My thoughts on this: - Ensure clear communication with key stakeholders and leadership to keep everyone informed and prepared. Escalation with a solution oriented approach works better than adopting a confrontational or accusatory tone. - Identify reasons for the modification(s) proposed and understand why it arose last minute. Was it a mere oversight, an afterthought or deliberate. - Conduct an impact analysis on the transaction, prioritizing deal integrity over expediency—sometimes no deal is better than a bad one.

Apart from what everyone has said, a critical aspect is to understand the need of that change and how does it impact the already agreed commitments. A lot of times this is due to a missed item in agreed terms which make the foundation of the draft and later on when the final draft is being reviewed with other stakeholders, an item very important for some function is found to be missing because the “business” may not have the same perspective of that item - a way to handle this is to create a list of agreed terms in layman’s terms and work through that in the form of a contract draft. If there is a missing term look at how it impacts the existing terms and if it’s just an issue of sentiment, build checks and balances to incorporate it.