An effective due diligence investigation will be a coordinated team effort involving the acquirer and all of the specialist advisors working together towards a common goal. In our experience, the most efficient approach is to identify one person from the acquirer's team to act as project manager, responsible for coordinating the due diligence and ensuring that responsibility for the due diligence work is appropriately assigned with minimal overlap. However, care must be taken to avoid excessive restrictions on each advisor's scope of work. In practice, there are certain key areas, such as reviews for contingencies, where both a legal and accounting perspective are valuable because the differing approaches often yield different findings. For certain review areas, assigning primary and secondary responsibility to the accounting and legal advisors is an effective way to minimize overlap while at the same time retaining the benefit of different perspectives in a particular area. Advisors should also ensure that key findings are communicated to the team promptly as issues identified from the financial due diligence review may require further follow-up in the legal due diligence or vice versa.

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