What are some tips for re-vamping my firm’s form checklist? I’ve never seen a great transaction checklist. I’d love to use excel, but that’s a nonstarter with the partners. Needs to be in Word…

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I'm fairly proficient in Excel (for a lawyer anyway) and I really think Word is better for a checklist. But a Word table.

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Ha! I hear you on crappy checklists and inexplicable format preferences. I’m in biglaw (lender side RE finance) so I am often thinking about the same thing - how to optimize checklists or make different samples geared toward a specific client’s quirks, common deal types with extra DD requirements, or loan execution types (CMBS, CLO, agency, balance sheet, etc).

I’ve been in this industry for almost a decade and have never seen an excel checklist (though I’ve created separate DD trackers and “master” checklists in excel for large portfolio deals or sister deals and used them alongside shorter word checklists when warranted by deal specifics. But as Counsel here notes, many checklists (especially clients’ forms) use tables inserted into Word.

The tables are kind of a pain and often result in a much longer doc (esp. if clients insist on legal tracking biz/UW items even though they have their own separate internal checklists…ugh), but they look cleaner and are typically organized more deliberately by subtopics (identified in alphanumerical order where the header cell for each category or major subcategory covers the entire table merged into one cell), usually in the following order: deal/property name and info, deal parties, loan docs/cash management/rate cap matters, party/org diligence (org chart, org docs and party searches), u&o matters (PSAs, COs, leases, service/management Ks, estoppels, SNDAs, etc.), property matters (title/survey/zoning, ESA, REAs, Rx Covs, LURAs, etc), opinions, lender conditions (if applicable), and standard pre-closing conditions. Obviously this gets tailored with extras depending on deal specifics but sorting similar items together definitely helps stay organized. On certain deals with important deadlines (PSA DD/TOE dates, any lender deadlines that could affect borrower financing in some way, etc), I add those at the top of the checklist too. Obviously that’s more important on acquisitions/sales than just refis but even refis have drop dead rate lock considerations too.

Hope that helps?

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