Legal Processing Outsourcing (LPO) is ideally suited to support corporate and outside counsel with M&A transactions. In a typical M&A deal, legal counsel will need to review volumes of contracts within tight timeframes, which can burden internal legal teams and hinder their focus on core, day-to-day work. By retaining an LPO to assist with M&A due diligence procedures, both corporate legal departments and law firms can manage deadlines and costs much more efficiently....

Core LPO Services Align with M&A Needs

LPOs can support both acquirers and company targets during the pre- and post-merger stages of an acquisition, providing a plethora of valuable supports tasks to facilitate transactions. Specifically, LPOs can:

• prepare target company profiles through public research
• coordinate the collection of contracts globally
• reconcile corporate agreements
• prepare consent requirements and obtain necessary consents
• assist in setting up data rooms, including redacting sensitive data
• perform reliable reviews of relevant contracts required for due diligence
• provide post-merger document review and support
• support post-deal integration plans
• The Proof Is in the Process

LPOs offer a process-oriented approach that makes M&A due diligence more efficient. By establishing project processes and procedures and assembling a dedicated team to the project, an LPO can act as the clearinghouse for all document collection and contract review processes. This model significantly reduces risk and inefficiencies because the review team serves as the quarterback for what is often a complex document review process.

Similarly, LPOs are set up to assist M&A legal teams on an ongoing basis. Since the LPO assigns a dedicated team to each project, the LPO serves as an extension of the M&A team, becoming accustomed to the client’s due diligence process to more quickly and effectively perform required review.

Leveraging Technology

In addition to human capital, LPOs make significant investments in infrastructure and technology, and often follow six sigma and other best practices that continually refine and improve upon their processes, enabling them to ensure greater efficiency and higher quality results.

LPOs bring to bear this best-in-breed infrastructure and technology to M&A transactions as well. Essentially, LPOs can automate a tedious manual process, which increases the quality of M&A due diligence review. Additionally, an LPO that is providing end-to-end M&A deal support can identify and develop a system of best practices that can improve efficiencies in legal service delivery for both corporate and outside counsel.

Time is of the essence when it comes to combining two companies into a greater and more efficient whole. When used intelligently and strategically, LPO is a valuable tool that can support M&A activity across the lifecycle, from evaluating potential merger partners or acquisition targets to integrating the new company after the deal closes.