In this article
Background
Legatics has undertaken research involving a broad spectrum of users and innovation teams within Corporate practice groups of Legatics customers. Through this research, we've discovered that lawyers across our customer base are increasingly turning to Legatics to manage the following in M&A deals:
Warranty disclosures
Q&A processes
Documents lists
This article outlines our findings focusing on the 'Q&A' process.
✍️ What does Q&A mean?
The Q&A (Question and Answer) process in a corporate M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) transaction is a crucial phase where the buyer conducts thorough due diligence on the target company. This process allows the buyer to gain a comprehensive understanding of the target's operations, financial health, potential risks and opportunities.
💼 How is this process managed outside of Legatics?
Excel or word are commonly used to track Q&A responses. Lawyers create detailed spreadsheets containing lists of questions, corresponding answers, status updates (e.g., pending, answered, follow-up required), and any additional notes or comments. Spreadsheets allow for organisation sorting, and filtering of information.
👎Pain points
Limited Organisation: Word and Excel lack built-in structures designed specifically for managing Q&A processes. While it's possible to create tables or lists to organise questions and answers, maintaining a clear and organised structure becomes challenging as the volume of information increases.
Difficulty in Tracking Changes: Tracking changes and updates to Q&A documents can be difficult to manage in Word and Excel, especially when multiple parties are involved. Without robust version control features, it's easy for changes to get overlooked or for different versions of the document to circulate, leading to confusion and errors.
Limited Collaboration Features: Word and Excel offer limited collaboration features. Collaborating on Q&A documents in real-time, assigning tasks, and tracking progress becomes more challenging, particularly when multiple team members need to work on the documents simultaneously.
Data Integrity Risks: Word and Excel documents are susceptible to data integrity risks such as accidental deletion, unauthorised changes, or version conflicts. Without robust access controls and audit trails, ensuring the integrity and security of Q&A documents becomes more challenging.
Version Control Challenges: Managing version control in Word and Excel documents can be complex, especially when multiple parties are making edits. Without robust version control features and audit trails, tracking changes and ensuring that everyone is working with the latest version of the document becomes challenging.
💡How can I use Legatics to manage this process?
Streamlined Document Collaboration: Legatics provides a centralised platform for document collaboration, allowing lawyers and other stakeholders involved in the M&A transaction to work together seamlessly. This reduces the need for email exchanges and manual tracking of document versions, streamlining the review and editing process.
Importing & Templates: Legatics allows lawyers to easily import legal text to create and manage a list with a few clicks. The ability to template a Q&A list, saves time and effort in drafting. Lawyers can leverage templates as a starting point and customise them to fit the specific needs of the M&A transaction, reducing the need to start from scratch.
Real-time Collaboration and Feedback: Legatics facilitates real-time collaboration and feedback among team members, allowing lawyers to communicate seamlessly and address comments and revisions efficiently. This promotes transparency and ensures that all stakeholders are kept informed throughout the drafting process.
Version Control and Audit Trail: Legatics provides robust version control and an audit trail feature that tracks all version changes made to the Q&A list, including comments and status changes. This ensures accountability and enables lawyers to monitor the evolution of the document over time, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies.
Permissions: Granular permissions can be set across Legatics to control who can view specific items within a list or a list in its entirety. For example, you may want to only grant internal access whilst compiling the questions, then bring in the seller for review and finally buyer at a later stage to answer. This can be achieved without the need for multiple email threads / documents.
Exporting: Easily export the list in a clean format with house branding applied.
📈 Key benefits of using Legatics
Time saved
The users responsible for creating the Q&A list save time doing this in Legatics by using a template and not having to copy and paste from different places (emails/word table).
Bulk status assignment allows the lawyer to easily assign rows to parties, organisations or Users, this is helpful for reviewing and keeping track of action ownership.
Word / PDF export allows for a finalised list to be filtered and exported.
Real time collaboration allows updates to be added and viewed immediately.
Improved clarity
The list is kept up to date in real time. This removes the reliance on a single person / team having to manually update responses in a word / excel tracker. It also acts as a single source of truth.
Version control
All versions are uploaded directly to Legatics so there is no confusion caused by multiple files sent back and forth via email. Users will be able to see when files were uploaded and by whom and all versions will be attached to the relevant row.
Errors reduced
Responses are added straight into Legatics which reduces the need for copy and pasting. This helps to reduce the risk of responses being pasted against the wrong question. If things do go wrong, users have a full log on the audit trail to correct any mistakes.
✏️ How can I use Legatics to manage the Q&A process?
We encourage you to set up a demo matter first and work with your M&A colleagues to create lists in Legatics and import data from your Word or Excel files.
Then you can turn those lists into templates so that you can use them again and again. This will help save you time when setting up new lists within new matters!
You're ready to create a live matter and start managing the Q&A process in your M&A transactions in Legatics!
📝 Resources to create demo matters
If you would like to create a demo matter to show this use case to your M&A deal teams please use the resource below.
The Q&A word table attached below has been set up in a simplified format. When using Legatics to manage the Q&A process you may want to:
Add more columns (free text / comments /dates etc)
Manage visibility using permissions
For further support, please contact support@legatics.com