What's the hardest part of working with outside counsel?

So there's two, you have two goals when you're working with them.

The goal is to close the deal.

So sometimes you have to push back on conservative lawyering.

Some examples of that are if you need to close over an immaterial closing condition, like a very remote tax thing in a part of the world that won't even be part of the deal or an extreme edge case indemnification issue that has a 0.01 chance of happening.

You want to push back on those because you're not going to ruin a lucrative business deal over something that may happen in 20 years.

And then second is remembering that M&A is very emotional, especially for co-founder CEOs.

Can you talk me through how do you structure the deal to protect for integration and how does that translate into the legal agreement?

What's the hardest part of working with outside counsel?

So there's two, you have two goals when you're working with them.

The goal is to close the deal.

So sometimes you have to push back on conservative lawyering.

Some examples of that are if you need to close over an immaterial closing condition, like a very remote tax thing in a part of the world that won't even be part of the deal or an extreme edge case indemnification issue that has a 0.01 chance of happening.

You want to push back on those because you're not going to ruin a lucrative business deal over something that may happen in 20 years.

And then second is remembering that M&A is very emotional, especially for co-founder CEOs.

Can you talk me through how do you structure the deal to protect for integration and how does that translate into the legal agreement?