A seller's counsel added a five-day review period to a standard purchase agreement and everyone treated it as a minor redline.

This is a version control problem wearing a deadline problem's clothes, and you have diagnosed it correctly. The coordinator built the calendar from a document that had not been confirmed as the final executed version. That confirmation step had no owner.

On files involving outside counsel, the gap you are describing sits between two handoffs: the moment an attorney marks a redline as agreed, and the moment a clean fully-executed copy is circulated to everyone building off it. In most workflows I have seen described, neither the attorney nor the coordinator claims that handoff explicitly, which is how four signed documents with four effective dates accumulate on a single file without anyone noticing.

One practical fix is a short written protocol, even a single line in the file checklist, that says: no one builds a calendar, updates a deadline tracker, or distributes dates until one named person confirms the circulated document matches what counsel considers executed. That person is usually the lead agent or the investor's transaction manager, because they are the ones with standing to push back on both the attorney and the coordinator. The coordinator can flag the gap and hold the calendar, but she is rarely positioned to tell outside counsel that a document needs re-circulation before it becomes operative.

The thing worth adding to your protocol is a version stamp requirement: every document that moves between parties gets a header or footer showing the date and time it was generated. That makes it visible immediately when someone is working from an old file.

For anyone reading this who is newer to transaction coordination, the strategy guide for this strategy covers the operational and regulatory complexity that makes process discipline like this so consequential. Worth reading if this thread is your introduction to what coordinators actually manage.

What does your current file checklist look like at the point of redline return, and does it include a step that pauses calendar work until executed copy is confirmed?

The assumption doing the most work in this scenario is that a redline is a drafting event rather than a contract event, and that distinction is where the workflow broke. When outside counsel marks up an agreement, most teams treat the document as still in negotiation until signatures land, but the moment a signed version exists, even if it is a marked-up PDF nobody formally circulated, the calendar starts running against it whether or not anyone has built the calendar yet.

On the ownership question: the cleanest assignment I have seen described is to make the coordinator's calendar a triggering document rather than a downstream one. The rule would be that no calendar gets built until the coordinator has received a fully-executed copy confirmed in writing by one named attorney of record, and that confirmation becomes the first item in the file. That shifts the problem upstream. The attorneys cannot treat distribution as someone else's administrative task if the transaction literally cannot proceed without their sign-off on what the executed document is.

The harder version of your question is what happens when both sides have counsel and neither considers document distribution to be in their scope. That is the gap that killed this file. A coordinator cannot reconcile four signed versions if nobody told her which one was operative, and blaming her for calendaring from the wrong one is just misdirected frustration at a process failure.

When outside counsel is in the file, does your team's engagement letter or transaction checklist actually name who is responsible for producing and distributing the clean executed copy, or is that still handled by whoever remembers to do it?