As a merger and acquisitions attorney, you know your way around an M&A transaction. Every deal team has a roster of specialists for taxes, finances, IP, and other concerns, but no team is complete without an M&A lawyer. You know the most about structuring and negotiating an M&A deal and coaching companies through the process, helping them navigate the deal as deftly as possible. There’s a reason you’re the expert.
But between managing the due diligence process, drafting and reviewing M&A contracts, leading negotiations, and strategizing with leadership and stakeholders, there’s a lot you have to juggle and mentally keep track of.
Fortunately, Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software can help you keep all your balls in the air. Rather than micromanaging each aspect of the process, lean on CLM technology more and let it take some of the more tedious tasks off your plate.
Here are three ways CLM can help M&A lawyers with their core responsibilities.
Drafting and reviewing contracts
A big part of an M&A attorney’s work is drafting and reviewing M&A contracts. These include letters of intent (LOIs), NDAs, term sheets, and M&A agreements.
Rather than drafting these contracts ad hoc, merger and acquisitions attorneys can use CLM to automate contract creation and streamline negotiation. In an end-to-end platform, you can maintain an accurate audit trail of the contract process. LinkSquares Finalize, for instance, allows you to automate contract review and use the summary to determine where to focus.
Organizing documents for due diligence
Due diligence is one of the most time-consuming aspects of M&A transactions. M&A lawyers dig through company contracts, financial statements, taxes, IP, and other business documents to get a full picture of the risks and benefits the acquirer will inherit.
CLM’s centralized contract repository allows merger and acquisitions lawyers to quickly gather the documents they need in far less time than a manual search would allow. Easy access to business agreements means organizing documents and populating data rooms only takes a fraction of the time it usually takes. Plus, CLM allows you to track consistency within contracts more easily.
Collaborate with the rest of the deal team
The beauty of a CLM tool is that it obliterates siloes — which is especially helpful during M&A activity when every member of the deal team needs to be on the same page.
Using a CLM, a merger and acquisitions lawyer can enable greater visibility into the drafting and negotiating process, share important documents with other advisors, collaborators, and shareholders, and visualize trends you uncover within the companies’ contracts and contact process. This way, your conversations become more dynamic and proactive.
Takeaways
A mergers and acquisitions attorney is capable of multi-tasking and keeping many balls in the air at once. They’ve done it for years without the help of CLM, but with the powerful technology available to them, M&A lawyers can streamline the process and free up their time for more strategic work.
Take LinkSquares CLM for a test drive to see for yourself. Contact us today.
