The speed at which we read has not changed in 100 years. If the typical business document is 200 to 250 words per page, it takes us 2 minutes/page to read that document. The typical attorney is charging $400/hour in 6 minute increments and their paralegals at $200/hour. For those organizations looking to manage an acquisition diligence or an eDiscovery effort, that means the cost to read each page of any document or email is ~$4/page.
Where this math is particularly concerning is when an effort to reconcile contracts to validate and price an acquisition is taking place; all those leases, customer contracts, employment contracts, warranties and other ‘financial instruments’ need to be found, validated and reviewed. But all the current systems of record for these could be across 10s or 100s of systems, they could be duplicated, where is the last-and-final version?, if they are on a renewal basis where is the most current version?…and this goes on.
50% of all acquisitions fail and one of the primary reasons is directly correlated to insufficient pre-merger analysis. No wonder, at $2 to $4/page to read-and-review. This also assumes you know where to look. What if there are a million, 10 page documents? Can you justify hiring a battalion of experts and spending $20-40 million + the technical cost to validate once you find them all? Not to mention these actions only have a 60-90 day window of time to complete!!
Bring in Topla, by InfoDNA solutions. As technical and business experts, the Topla product and InfoDNA people can bring expedience and automation to this process while also cutting the billable time down by 10 fold in both people and calendar time. It can:
- Crawl in every corner of the business to search out documents
- Validate them across sources to find that last-and-final copy for review
- Automate the classification and prioritization of every file and help confirm what needs to be reviewed – and what doesn’t
- Put all of it into one place to review during the pre-merger effort and negotiations and post-merger roll up of data.
- Dashboard the entire effort to drive service level agreements of both the billable team and internal stake holders.
All the while, allowing the uncovering of what is important and utilizing modern automation to have the experts only focus on what makes sense.
Ask us at www.infodnasolutions.com to show you how.
