My brokerage is three months old and I still don't have a written policy for how I handle an agent who goes dark on a transaction

Three months in with no coverage policy is honestly where most small brokerages are, they just don't admit it until something breaks. The attorney call at 9 p.m. is the policy writing itself in real time.

The "family situation" cover probably bought you goodwill but it also set a precedent that you'll absorb the chaos when an agent disappears, and that's going to keep happening until there's a written consequence attached to going dark during an active contingency window.

The piece I'd nail down first isn't even the coverage rotation, it's what authority you actually have to act on an agent's file without their signature, because that's the lawsuit exposure, not the phone call.

The deal surviving doesn't mean you made the right call, it means you got lucky once. What you told that attorney was a verbal representation with nothing behind it, and if that extension had collapsed and the buyer walked, you'd be the one explaining your "family situation" story in a deposition. Six hours is a long time but honestly the real number I'd be drawing the line at is ninety minutes, that's where I think you actually still have room to maneuver on most contingency windows. One page, this week, naming a specific coverage agent for each active file and requiring the covering agent to log every contact attempt in the transaction file while the primary is dark. That document is what separates "brokerage policy" from "we figured it out on the fly" when someone is reading your records later.