Who Form 8815 Transaction 2023-2024

This next session, I think we've been looking forward to for some time now. Rick and I met many months ago and had planned out this concept, and I'm so pleased to see it now coming together because both Rick and Keith are going to walk through a mock negotiation. They're going to endeavor to cover three different issues in an M&A transaction. This really hits to the spirit of what we're doing with transaction advisors, which is to understand and uncover the best practice in putting deals together. Collectively, I think we can advance the practice of better, more strategic, more thoughtful negotiations, better deals, and certainly, this will hit right on the right home in terms of that ambition. So with that, let me turn it over to Rick and Keith. We're going to lead this next session. Thanks. Okay, well thank you, William. Can everybody hear me? Okay, good. So my name is Rick Klieman. I'm joined this afternoon by my Hogan Lovells colleague, Keith Lau. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit on behalf of both of us that between the two of us, we have more than six decades of collective M&A experience and advice. It's depressing to even say that. But our focus today, as William suggested, is going to be on negotiating M&A deals and, in particular, negotiating certain purchase price formulations that I'm guessing many of you in the audience have dealt with before. And also, time permitting, we're going to address a growing and at times annoying trend that has emerged in the negotiation of key provisions in the acquisition agreement. That is the reliance, and I would almost say blind reliance, on these now widely proliferated deal point studies that many of you have seen. These are statistical surveys that purport to...