WASHINGTON — Although the Senate finally voted Thursday to send regulatory reform to the president's desk, policy circles are already abuzz about what changes to seek in a "corrections" bill to fix problems with the legislation.

Top lawmakers have acknowledged another bill will be needed to clean up their bill to overhaul the financial system, in which many complicated provisions were decided near the end of a marathon 20-hour session.

"Everybody knows that there are many technical changes that will need to be made," said Cornelius Hurley, a banking and financial law professor at the Boston University School of Law. "Anytime that you slap stuff together at 5 in the morning, mistakes get made and need to be corrected."

The corrections would be yet another step in the marathon process to overhaul the financial system. On Thursday the Senate passed, 60 to 39, the version completed last month by a conference of members from both chambers.

But how far the corrections bill could go remains a question. Some said it may be confined to technical changes to better reflect congressional intent; others see an opportunity to make more substantive alterations.

Despite concerns raised by fellow lawmakers, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank refused to reopen the bill after making last-minute changes designed to ensure the legislation had enough political support.

Instead, the two chairmen said there would be a future bill to make corrections, and tried to reassure lawmakers that they have plenty of time to enact a bill before the regulatory reform legislation goes into effect.

"Anytime you have a 2,000-page bill there's always a technical corrections bill that comes at some point, because … there's always some things you want to look at," Dodd told reporters after wrapping up the conference committee at the end of June. "As I pointed out on this particular provision, none of the provisions go into effect for another year, so we have some time."

But Frank hinted during the final conference session that the next bill may go beyond "technical" repairs. The Massachusetts Democrat did not elaborate and told reporters he was unsure what issues would be tweaked or how in later legislation.

"I don't know yet," he said. "There were a couple of drafting errors. … Look, these people who work here do an enormously complicated job very well. There are some typos, some that would be considered technical, some which can't be considered technical and go beyond that. I don't know what the answer to that is yet … but yeah, you'll need a minor corrections bill, you always do for something this big."

How much lawmakers will be willing to tinker with the bill after it passes is unclear.

"There are two kinds of corrections you can do," said Oliver Ireland, a partner with the law firm Morrison & Foerster. "One of them is you do a corrections bill that is a cleanup and noncontroversial. You make a list of all the corrections with explanations and you send it around and if anybody on your committee objects, you take it off the list. But the idea is that you do a corrections bill on things that need real corrections: They got the wrong page, the wrong cross reference, something like that. On those corrections that would be noncontroversial there are probably a lot of them."

But there is another possibility, Ireland said.

"There are things that other people will call 'corrections,' like they'll look at a substantive word someplace and say that should have gone out; or an 'and' should be an 'or' or vice versa," he said. "Those can be pretty substantive and make a real difference."

Democrats and the Obama administration are counting financial reform as a major victory and would be unlikely to allow any changes to go through that could be perceived as watering the bill down.

Several observers said they expected lawmakers would have little appetite to touch it again before the elections unless some noncontroversial alterations were immediately pressing.

"Obviously there's a million loose ends. There's a million things people will want to change," said Kip Weissman, a partner with Luse Gorman. "We are really running out of time before the elections. … The only kind of technical corrections you would think you would see is something that everyone readily agrees kind of helps everybody."

Financial services lawyers, regulators and analysts are still poring over the legislation and identifying places where language is ambiguous, conflicting or does not correctly define or describe what it intends.