I get a bit skeptical when interviewees or junior lawyers say they enjoy doing legal due diligence work.

My first reaction would be, “Really?”

Is it possible to enjoy doing legal due diligence work?

The volume of documents to be reviewed, tight deadlines, amount of effort required to get complete and relevant information from target companies, high level of attention to detail required to identify all issues, and mind-numbing/mundane task of aligning tables and formatting reports, make legal due diligence a tedious process.

If you aspire to do corporate transactional work, legal due diligence will be a big part of your work.

On the upside, you’ll learn about the law relevant to your practice area while carrying out due diligence exercise. After all, you will be able to identify issues only if you have done your research and know the relevant law.

You’ll learn to provide solutions. It’s not much use if you merely highlight issues in due diligence reports without recommending solutions to clients.

You’ll learn to be concise (or at least try to). No one wants to read verbatim extract of contracts in legal due diligence reports.

You’ll learn to be meticulous. There’s a (big) difference between RM10,000,000 and RM100,000,000 when you insert the wrong amount of consideration of a contract in a report.

Maybe, with all the upside, it’s possible to enjoy doing legal due diligence work.😆

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This post was first posted on Linkedin on 1 July 2022.