Lawyer Monthly Magazine - September 2021 Edition

ZIGNSEC’S ACQUISITION OF WEB SHIELD GROUP MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS 79 SEP 2021 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM Shield’s operations department to provide Ernst & Young (the buyer’s auditor) with all the documents and answers. Web Shield’s Data Protection Officer collaborated strongly with our GDPR team and Eversheds Sweden to deliver all necessary agreements and declarations. On top of that, all lawyers, CEOs and shareholders of both parties communicated and coordinated – sometimes daily – to close all burning issues. You see – and I really think that this is the main matter – if the seller wants to sell a company and the buyer wants to buy it, it is essential for the managing lawyers to understand that our job is to help them to reach a consensus, to highlight and solve issues in advance, and not to obstruct. How did you work to ensure that the outcome of the deal was beneficial for all participants? I am a strong believer in the win-win negotiation approach. Only when the parties are fully transparent may the overall value of the transaction be fully revealed. It is also our job to create an atmosphere of safety and calmness. This means that we are obliged to ask questions in a constructive manner to ensure full disclosure of all important aspects. These questions can be neither dry nor negative-sounding, especially when they address delicate aspects of the transaction – such as those which may lead to a dealbreaker situation. Hence why framing a question, and explaining the objective, the fears, and the rationale is so crucial. Naturally, I cannot disclose all aspects of this transaction, but I can say that this approach allowed us to finalise in the set time and it seems that it laid the fundaments for years of great business development for the parties. Do you expect to work on other deals of this kind in the near future? The short answer is yes, we do expect that. But there is a longer, more interesting answer. Our best work is the kind we cannot brag about. It is the troublesome, delicate situations our clients face and want to be confidential. We have worked for banks, we have worked for satellite designers, we have worked for arms producers. Each of those projects had a common theme – a great product or service which required coordination with IT experts, managers, mechanics and designers, yet also demanded legal advice, which turned into coordination of the entire transaction. This is what we like doing the most, and is the reason why our clients like us so much and stay with us for so many years. Legal Adviser to Web Shield