Top 6 Online Resources for Deal Makers – What you should know about (Part 1 of 2)

Whether you're a seasoned deal maker or just starting out, we all rely on various resources to stay apprised of the cutting edge developments in M&A. Given that the latest information is driven by online resources, we thought it would be appropriate to put together a list of our favourite resources that help keep us plugged in to emerging trends and events:

  1. SEDAR and EDGAR: SEDAR is the mandatory document filing and retrieval system for all Canadian public companies and in many ways is the equivalent of EDGAR. SEDAR is perhaps so obvious and common it doesn't need to make this list but for the same reasons it can also be #1 on the list. It goes back to January 1, 1997 and can be searched by company name, industry group, document type or filing date. It's a great free tool to grab a document when you know exactly what you're looking for.
  2. DisclosureNet: Subscription service that provides the disclosure documents in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. The full-text searching capabilities allow you to navigate through the contents of documents, which are not otherwise searchable, and offers more than 40 search filtering criteria. It also offers real-time notification alerts for when any filing, press release or insider trade has been filed by a company of interest to you. A great tool for research and for keeping track of clients, prospects and transaction participants in real time.
  3. Thomson Reuters Business Law Currents: Distributes a weekly email that summarizes the latest news related to business law and highlights new analytical content on the Business Law Currents website. The website provides selected daily news in various legal areas, including M&A, and timely legal analysis.
  4. Practical Law Company: US subscription service that offers practice notes ranging from basic overviews in certain topics to detailed analysis such as key terms and carve-outs typically negotiated in various agreements. PLC houses lots of useful standard forms, clauses and documents with drafting notes. PLC also maintains What's Market, a database that allows you to search, compare and summarize deal documents and securities filings.
  5. mergermarket: International subscription deal intelligence service that provides proprietary analysis on corporate strategy before it becomes public. Users can sign up for customized daily alerts, real time alerts and search the online deals database.
  6. myCorporateResource.com: Compiles the client alerts published by the top 100 American law firms, aggregates the alerts into categories, reviews the alerts, sorts them and summarizes the content for free. It also offers over 70 RSS Feeds set up by individual categories of industry, professional role, area of law and geography. A great tool to help digest a huge volume of high quality US perspectives.

Stay tuned for our next blog post where we will look at free deal commentary resources, including blogs and online journals.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.