Mergers and Due Diligence
The Issues
Before or during a merger or acquisition, there are several situations that currently require expensive, resource intensive labor.
First, the due diligence process is a painstaking, mostly manual process of figuring out what to request, requesting it, gathering the documents, reading the documents, and analyzing them to try to find corporate liabilities. This process adds costs and delays to mergers or acquisitions depending on how much data there is, and in what condition it is stored.
Similarly, in order to effectively negotiate contracts and acquisition deals, there may be information related to customers, past legal cases, or current management issues that need to be investigated. This process also can add cost and delay the completion of the deal.
Another major problem during mergers or acquisitions is the inability to transfer knowledge to the new management and staff. This is often critical to the success of the new entity, and is often the hardest objective to meet due the human factor of memory, attitude and the amount of manual effort involved.
Much of the information in the above situations is stored in a company’s e-mail system, but in such a massive, non-indexed manner, that it cannot easily be searched and becomes virtually useless.
The MailMeter Solution
By implementing MailMeter in a target company, the acquiring company can perform a number of in-depth keyword searches across the corporation from a historical perspective on their own, without the expensive legal fees associated with outside professionals.
This will help accelerate the due diligence phase, provide much better information on specific concerns, potential intellectual property breaches, regulatory compliance effectiveness, and in general give both parties better information for a successful deal.
Searches can be done for subject line words, attachment types, and even message body and attachment text. A full history of all incoming, outgoing and internal e-mails and user-deleted e-mails is archived and is easily searchable by authorized users.
Your legal staff can be equipped to perform extensive, multi-faceted forensic research on all e-mail communications immediately, all through an easy to use web-based secure interface.
MailMeter Benefits
- Full compliance with all regulations
- Save storage in your e-mail server - faster backups, disaster recovery, and better reliability
- Dramatically reduce costs of legal investigations
- Protect intellectual property
- Reduce organization and executive exposure
- Improve employee education about risky behavior
- Increase integrity of information since transactions cannot be deleted from the archive
- Improve productivity by enforcing the E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy
Important Questions to ask your IT, Legal, and Compliance Officer
As an executive, you should be very concerned at the lack of infrastructure, process and controls for archiving e-mail in your organization. You should ask your management team these important questions. If they cannot answer these questions, you may be placing your company at serious risk.
- What would be the cost or damage if your company had to pay penalty fines, or if you were fined or sanctioned for non-compliance?
- Do you have an E-mail Acceptable Usage Policy? Do all of your employees know it?
- How do you know when your policy has been broken? How do you measure, manage and enforce your policy?
- How many times has an employee e-mailed confidential information in error? Or on purpose?
- How do you know if employees are e-mailing offensive material to others within or outside the company?
- What percentage of your company e-mail is non-work related?
- How many gigabytes of pictures, music and movie files travel through your company each week?
