Checklist · Mergers & Acquisitions / Private Equity
Acquisition due-diligence request list (United States private deal)
Request list for diligence on a US private stock or asset purchase: corporate records, contracts, employees, intellectual property, privacy, litigation and Hart-Scott-Rodino facts. The lawyer cuts it to the deal.
- Kind
- Checklist. Steps or checks to work through and tick off.
- Where it applies
- United States
- AI use
- Yellow You and the tool draft together, with you directing. You check every statement you rely on.
- Law stated as at
- 22 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked on 22 October 2026 against the 3 authorities it cites, for United States.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Use to ask a private-company seller for the first set of documents on a stock or asset purchase. Cut categories that do not apply. It is not a merger-notification form and it is not a disclosure schedule.
Used for these tasks
- Triage the data room and draft a first-pass issues list
- Triage and classify a data room with AI
- Extract key terms across contracts for a DD report
- Prepare the employment due-diligence issues list for the deal
Each task page says how far AI may help with the task and what the lawyer must review.
How AI may be used
AI may assemble this list from the deal type and index what the data room actually contains against it. The lawyer decides which requests to send and which gaps matter.
AI may
- Drop categories the instructions say do not apply, and keep a record of what was dropped
- Match documents in the data room to the numbered requests and list requests with no document
- Build a chronology of missing dates from the documents that were produced
AI must not
- Must not send the list to the seller
- Must not describe a missing document as a breach of a representation
- Must not conclude that a Hart-Scott-Rodino filing is required
The lawyer checks
- The list matches a stock deal or an asset deal, not both, unless the structure is undecided
- Privilege is not requested in a form that would waive it
- Employment, WARN and privacy requests are answered from documents, not from a guess about headcount
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Read the full text
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- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
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All precedents for Mergers & Acquisitions / Private Equity · Tasks and AI use in this area