A prompt for first-round M&A diligence
Describe the deal in a paragraph. Get a structured diligence-question prompt for any AI tool.
First-round diligence questions are not generic. The right question list for a SaaS Series A is different from the right list for a manufacturing roll-up, which is different from the right list for a cross-border carve-out. Generic checklists give generic results.
The diligence question prompt generator tailors the request. Pick the deal type from a dropdown of 13 common structures. Add a one-paragraph description of the target. The tool builds a prompt that asks the AI to produce a structured first-round checklist tailored to your specific deal, with stage-specific and specialist-needed flags.
How to use the output
Paste the prompt into your AI tool of choice. The output is a starting point for the diligence team’s actual checklist. Two passes are typical: the team adds the matter-specific questions the AI did not surface, and the team strips the questions that do not apply to the actual deal.
For experienced counsel, this is mostly a time saver. For less experienced counsel or a non-lawyer who wants to understand what diligence on a particular kind of deal usually covers, it is a useful orientation.
The deeper essay on AI in M&A diligence is here. The short version is that AI is good at orientation and structured generation, weak at synthesis and absence detection. The diligence prompt generator sits in the AI-strong part of the workflow.
Walter Allison is a corporate attorney in Denver. He writes here about M&A, private equity, and venture capital structure.
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