that needs to exist between Buyer and Seller in mind. Due to this, it is very important to choose a lawyer with significant M&A experience and avoid lawyers that are mainly property oriented, for example. The other issue we find with lawyers is that they tend to take on too much work and if your transaction is a small one and they have no 3rd party connection, your project may get pushed to a lower priority. Due to this, it is often helpful to choose a lawyer that regularly does work for the M&A Advisor or has some other connection to someone you know where performance on your transaction will have a good or bad wider impact on that relationship.
Accountant Issues
Accountants are vital team members during an M&A transaction. The Seller's accountant will need to produce historical reports as well as assist with future projects and validate the commercial framework and advise on tax issues. The first issue arises when the accountant is very slow to produce these reports and the project team is left waiting in limbo until they do. This is a difficult problem to solve and up to the Seller to put pressure on them to meet deadlines or consider hiring an outside M&A accountant to help with the transaction. The other issue with accountants is that they often have very little training and exposure to key aspects of an M&A transaction. The first is that they do not really deal in 'risk'. For example, few people would ask their accountant which stock to buy on the stock market, this is intuitive. Yet risk runs through the M&A paradigm, driving everything from business valuations to payment terms and interest rates. They also generally don't view the world through the personal situation of their clients (i.e. that the client needs to retire for personal reasons and it is not just about financial calculations). Most accountants also have little formal training in business valuation which
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