What did due diligence in M&A deals look like before virtual data rooms? Teams of lawyers and other experts combing through paper files stacked floor to ceiling in a conference room.

With the virtual data room, explains Darryl Grant of Toppan Merrill, those days are long gone.

Today, sharing a company’s financials, contracts, and other pertinent information with potential buyers is a simple matter of uploading some documents and sending an email.

We talk about how this speeds up the process and ensures transactions move more quickly through the marketplace, as well as…

• The remote document kill-switch
• A positive by-product of the Enron scandal
• Using data rooms to get “actionable intelligence” on prospective buyers
• Where IPOs are trending in 2019
• And more