TODAY’S GENER AL COUNSEL SUMMER 2019
BEST PRACTICES FOR STREAMLINING M&A By Nick Perdikis
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here’s much optimism about the mergers and acquisition market, with transactions predicted to continue strong through June this year. But optimism alone doesn’t make for a fruitful deal. Anyone involved in M&A knows that successful integration of the two involved organizations is where value is truly realized. A significant chunk of this responsibility falls to general counsel and their teams. General counsel oversee a vast portfolio of duties, including corporate M&A. Managing this wide-ranging portfolio puts increased pressure on legal resources, which isn’t helped by the fact that M&A legal teams are also constrained by high-frequency, manual processes and workflows that introduce inefficiencies and errors. They must find ways to leverage best practices and technology. Here are some things they can do to streamline legal operations and free up resources to focus on what matters. Excel without Excel. Most M&A activity is conducted using processes that, while still adequate, do not take advantage of current technology. Consider the traditional spreadsheet, a favorite among
legal teams. Deal attorneys and legal analysts rely on spreadsheets-based checklists to track the complexities of deal flow, including due diligence, drafting and amending agreements and memorandums, tracking signatories, reporting to management, and so on. It’s a labor intensive, inefficient, and fragmented process that limits collaboration, propagates duplication and introduces risk. Further, since spreadsheets are individually owned and siloed from other IT systems, users turn to other ways to Nick Perdikis is CEO share information, and Chief Revenue such as secure Officer of Devensoft, where for the past data storage platsix years, he has forms or virtual grown the company data rooms. into a leader in the These pitfalls B2B SaaS market by can be avoided helping companies around the world betby stepping away ter manage, execute from the spreadand deliver on their sheet. They still M&A programs. have a role to play, nperdikis@ but it’s important devensoft.com
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