October 12, 2020
How Legal Teams Can Overcome 3 Major Buy-Side M&A Challenges
By Steve J. Tie Shue, Sr. Director - Product Marketing
Earlier this year Datasite released our Legal Dealmakers Market Report. Among the most intriguing insights are the unique experiences and challenges faced by buy-side matter teams. Almost 70% report researching potential targets for clients six months or more prior to a transaction closing. Once a target is chosen, legal teams often need to complete due diligence within sixty days.
Three major challenges usually threaten accelerated due diligence timelines:
- Collaboration – Buy-side legal advisors usually work closely with more than fifteen people to complete due diligence. That’s a large number of stakeholders to keep track of and to keep informed.
- Oversight – Most legal professionals use Microsoft Office applications like Excel or Word for tracking individual tasks and overall due diligence status. These resources inevitably present limitations related to currency in tracking, version control, and engaging with external deal team members.
- Reporting – Lawyers report spending at least 2-hours weekly per transaction on legal due diligence management reports. This is often a painful process riddled with piecing together status updates and key insights from disparate sources before spending more time in PowerPoint than ever imagined in law school.
Datasite recently announced a new buy-side solution designed to address these common challenges. Here are three reasons why Datasite Acquire resonates in a particularly profound way for legal advisors seeking productivity gains.
You get to keep your checklist but make it even better
Lists appeal to the core of legal advisory – careful oversight of what needs to get done, disciplined adherence to timelines, and strict accountability of those ultimately responsible for each deliverable. Datasite Acquire allows you to build trackers with real-time access to updates for all members of the deal team. Already have a tried and true checklist template? Simply copy and paste it into our tracker wizard to get the due diligence process started.
You’ll also love the ability to link documents within the buy-side repository directly to individual tasks for others to reference. Ditto for the ease of sorting or filtering information.
Seamless and secure deal team collaboration
Even before the pandemic introduced additional remote work considerations, capturing the attention of other deal team members for a simple status update was never as simple as a walk down the hallway. Datasite Acquire solves for two major buy-side deal team collaboration challenges:
- First, a streamlined findings tool – permissioned at the user level – allows for ongoing review of key learnings as they are uncovered.
- Second, in-app document commenting with @mentions allows you to immediately notify specific deal team members when something requires their attention.
These two features combine to net legal teams hours in seamless productivity gains while working securely.
Transaction management insights made easy
Datasite Acquire provides deal teams with management-level reporting on-the-fly. Detailed analytics on findings, tasks, and deal team activity served up upon login – PowerPoint ready.
Much like technology automation and machine learning now allow sell-side legal advisors to bid adieu to their beloved Sharpie for the due diligence task of redaction, Datasite Acquire will have buy-side advisors letting go of Excel checklists and Sharepoint – by choice.
Curious to learn more? Click here to schedule a demo.
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