Earlier this week, Atlassian published its form acquisition
letter of intent under the banner of The M&A Process is
Broken: It's outdated, inefficient and combative.
Atlassian developed and published the LOI in an effort to
eliminate time-and-expense of negotiating issues that, based on its
experience and research, rarely come into play following the deal
closing. By reducing such adversarial positioning, Atlassian hopes
to increase collective focus on realizing the larger commercial,
product and/or talent synergies that underpin the basis for the
deal in the first instance.
In our experience, the M&A market already has prescribed a
fairly narrow range of key deal terms and arriving at a finalized
term sheet is not often an agonizing process. Due diligence, on the
other hand, can be particularly burdensome for founders, but the
larger goals of the exercise typically extend to post-closing
integration as well as risk mitigation. While streamlining the
M&A process is
