Ask the law firms
During M&A Day, we asked our private practice partners what they would like to change about the way the deals process is currently done. This is what they said:
Don’t have a lot of external lawyers negotiating points the sake of it. This can be avoided by taking time at the outset to get the right deal team onboard - both internally and externally!
Make sure that you have identified who within your in house legal team is going to be responsible for which work streams, how that's going to work, who the key decision makers are going to be, who you have to defer to for different different decisions on different matters.
Make for a better due diligence process! Some of that can be helped by the tech solutions being developed, but right now it’s about setting up processes early on to capture the data.
Have those early conversations, set up the processes and speak to your lawyers and accountants and ask them: what is it you're going to be asking me for in years to come?
The approach to NDAs, particularly on auction processes! It can be massively time consuming, and waste a huge amount of money.
Having a standardised NDA can avoid this, along with crib sheets for easier negotiation.
Try and move away from away from a system that can feel naturally adversarial!
Be brave enough to be quite open and collaborative with each other and try to avoid these set piece, head on collisions of ideas!
Don’t have a lot of external lawyers negotiating points the sake of it. This can be avoided by taking time at the outset to get the right deal team onboard - both internally and externally!
Make sure that you have identified who within your in house legal team is going to be responsible for which work streams, how that's going to work, who the key decision makers are going to be, who you have to defer to for different different decisions on different matters.
Make for a better due diligence process! Some of that can be helped by the tech solutions being developed, but right now it’s about setting up processes early on to capture the data.
Have those early conversations, set up the processes and speak to your lawyers and accountants and ask them: what is it you're going to be asking me for in years to come?
The approach to NDAs, particularly on auction processes! It can be massively time consuming, and waste a huge amount of money.
Having a standardised NDA can avoid this, along with crib sheets for easier negotiation.
Try and move away from away from a system that can feel naturally adversarial!
Be brave enough to be quite open and collaborative with each other and try to avoid these set piece, head on collisions of ideas!