Disputes handled by TeamX can only address the hours, not the quality.
What does it mean:
I find answers to this question I asked elsewhere very interesting and divergent, but asking here for the second opinion as I also got an answer from a court interpreter which was quite surprising in the interpretation of the sentence.
The sentence has a rather easy-to-spot subject (construction): Disputes [handled by TeamX]. This is the verb construction is can [only] address and it has two objects: only [address] the hours as well as not the quality. The only clearly belongs to the first object, but makes no grammatical sense with the second. The sentence would be arguably less ambiguous if there was a but after the comma for [but] not the quality.
As such, the sentence is easy: TeamX can only handle (address) disputes regarding the length of work (hours). But TeamX can not handle disputes about the quality of work.
I agree with the conclusions of the other answers that are based on dictionaries and grammar, but I answer to add that these interpretations do not necessarily match the legal interpretation.
See Sattva Capital Corp. v. Creston Moly Corp., 2014 SCC 53 (citations omitted):
[48] ... the interpretation of contracts has evolved towards a practical, common-sense approach not dominated by technical rules of construction. The overriding concern is to determine “the intent of the parties and the scope of their understanding”. To do so, a decision-maker must read the contract as a whole, giving the words used their ordinary and grammatical meaning, consistent with the surrounding circumstances known to the parties at the time of formation of the contract. Consideration of the surrounding circumstances recognizes that ascertaining contractual intention can be difficult when looking at words on their own, because words alone do not have an immutable or absolute meaning:
No contracts are made in a vacuum: there is always a setting in which they have to be placed. . . . In a commercial contract it is certainly right that the court should know the commercial purpose of the contract and this in turn presupposes knowledge of the genesis of the transaction, the background, the context, the market in which the parties are operating.
[48] The meaning of words is often derived from a number of contextual factors, including the purpose of the agreement and the nature of the relationship created by the agreement. As stated by Lord Hoffmann:
The meaning which a document (or any other utterance) would convey to a reasonable [person] is not the same thing as the meaning of its words. The meaning of words is a matter of dictionaries and grammars; the meaning of the document is what the parties using those words against the relevant background would reasonably have been understood to mean. [p. 115]
What does it mean:
- TeamX can only address hours in handling the dispute, not the quality or
- dispute can only address hours not the quality
The statement "Disputes handled by TeamX can only address the hours, not the quality" is poorly written. Regardless, only option 1 makes sense.
Rather than addressing something, disputes are about something. Only entities address a dispute, whether it is by discussing it, litigating it, ruling on it, or otherwise processing it (for purposes of billing, time management, and so forth). Accordingly, although the statement makes no sense, notions premised on "what a dispute can address" are to be ruled out.
An acceptable wording of option 2 is "only disputes regarding hours, not quality, may be addressed by TeamX", thereby paraphrasing option 1.
Specifying what "surprising" interpretation you got from the court interpreter might have prompted us to ponder points or subtleties that otherwise are going unnoticed.
