Unfortunately, an acquisition is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get. Even if it’s an asset purchase, rather than a merger or stock sale, when you’re buying a company, there’s risk that you’ll be assuming unknown liabilities. For example, unbeknownst to you, a seller may be insolvent, and the transfer of assets to you […]
Category Archives: Featured
What you need to know about M&A letters of intent
Preliminary outlines of proposed M&A deals—whether called letters of intent (LOIs), term sheets or memoranda of understanding (MOUs)—allow parties to sketch out fundamental terms quickly before expending substantial resources on negotiating definitive agreements, finalizing due diligence, pursuing third-party approvals and other matters. M&A letters of intent appear simple (they aren’t) and as something that can be advanced without lawyers (they shouldn’t […]
What you need to know about M&A confidentiality agreements
Most M&A transactions are material to the parties involved, and public disclosure that a deal is in the offing can have profound effects on a company’s operations, ranging from employee attrition to loss of confidence by commercial counterparties. Of course, for public companies, exploration of strategic alternatives may constitute material nonpublic information implicating Regulation FD (which […]
Will you elaborate on the use of earnouts in M&A deals?
This is a follow-up to an earlier post on earnouts in M&A deals. I’ve embedded below a detailed presentation on earnouts I prepared last year. It is intended to serve as a stand-alone document that does not require any verbal commentary. Topics include: An introduction to earnouts Determining whether to use an earnout How to measure […]
Introduction to M&A Earnouts
M&A earnouts can help you get deals done . . . but not without risk. An earnout is a deal financing mechanism where the buyer agrees to make future payments to the seller if certain agreed-upon financial or operating targets are reached after closing. The future payments are usually in addition to amounts paid at closing and […]
M&A Fiduciary Duties: Maximizing Shareholder Value
You owe minority investors or other shareholders special fiduciary duties when you sell your company. As I discussed in a prior post, directors, officers and others who control companies (let’s call them “control persons”), owe certain baseline fiduciary duties to shareholders. Under Delaware law, the benchmark for corporate governance in the United States, these duties apply […]
Fiduciary Duties: Minority Shareholder Rights
Officers, directors, managers, controlling stockholders and other control persons of corporations and other entities frequently have responsibilities to minority owners set forth in their companies’ organizational documents (charters, bylaws, operating agreements, etc.). For example, a control person may be required to give investors access to a company’s books and records. In addition, state law imposes […]
Introduction to M&A Transaction Structure
The determination of an optimal M&A transaction structure is a complex process driven by a number of considerations.* A thorough examination of the subject could fill a book. That said, below is a brief overview of the most common transaction structures—stock purchase, asset purchase, negotiated merger and two-step merger—along with some advantages and disadvantages of each. […]
Private M&A Transaction Process
In this first part of a two-part series on the subject, I will discuss the typical private M&A transaction process. (Private M&A refers to a transaction where the shares of the target company are not traded on a securities exchange.) In the second part, I will discuss the timeline for a typical negotiated public M&A deal. Step […]