Review your sale readiness before buyers start digging

The right approach often depends on the scope of the work and the risk you are trying to manage. This service is usually for business owners preparing for a sale who want to understand what a buyer is likely to question before the deal reaches an advanced stage. It can be useful for established trading businesses, founder-led companies and groups with a mix of contracts, intellectual property, staff arrangements or leased premises. It is especially helpful where the seller wants to identify weak spots early rather than reacting to buyer comments under time pressure.

A vendor due diligence review often uncovers unsigned or outdated contracts, change-of-control clauses, missing intellectual property assignments, gaps in contractor or employment paperwork, lease issues, incomplete governance records and inconsistencies between what the business says it owns and what the documents actually show. It can also reveal where a buyer may push for broader warranties, price adjustments or special conditions. The document needs to line up with your actual privacy practices, including how information moves through the business, so the review is strongest when the documents and the day-to-day position are considered together.

It is usually most useful before the business is formally marketed or before a buyer's diligence process is underway. That timing gives you a chance to deal with missing paperwork, clarify ownership issues and think about disclosure strategy before the buyer starts using those points as leverage. Even if discussions with a buyer have already started, the review can still be valuable, particularly where the sale data room is incomplete or the seller has not yet stress-tested its records. Earlier is generally better, but it is not too late once interest has emerged.

Not usually. The purpose of the vendor due diligence service is to identify and prioritise the legal issues that may affect the sale, then explain the likely next steps. Some findings may only need better organisation or clearer disclosure, while others may require separate legal work such as assignment deeds, contract updates, governance corrections or sale-specific drafting. We will indicate which issues are relatively contained and which ones may need broader support. Ongoing representation to implement all remedial work is outside the fixed-fee unless we include it in your quote.

After engagement, we will ask for the core documents relevant to the proposed sale, such as major customer and supplier contracts, lease documents, governance records and key intellectual property or staff-related materials. We then review those materials, identify the main legal issues and prepare a report that groups findings into practical action points. That may include items to fix before going to market, matters to disclose clearly, and issues likely to attract buyer questions. We can then discuss the report with you and outline whether any follow-up legal work is worth prioritising.

Just submit an enquiry via this page or click the 'get started' button on our website to submit an enquiry. After you've submitted an enquiry, one of our legal consultants will review your enquiry within 1 business day and get in touch to get a better idea of exactly what you are looking for.

Then your legal consultant will send through an email with a bit more information about the services you need, along with a fixed fee quote setting out costs, scope of the service and timing. Have a read through it, and if you're happy with the scope, you can accept and sign our engagement letter online - easy!

Once you've formally accepted, we'll connect you with a specialist lawyer and they will work with you to complete your project. They will contact you by email or phone if they need to get in touch.

Sprintlaw works on fixed-fee pricing wherever possible, so you can review the scope and cost before you decide whether to proceed. For the Vendor Due Diligence Pack service, pricing starts from $2,000.00.

After you enquire, a legal consultant will confirm what is included, the expected timing and whether any extra work is needed before you engage us.

We operate completely online, which means we can help you wherever you are in New Zealand. We have office spaces in Sydney, and in Melbourne, but our use of technology allows our team members to work remotely from around the world. Our legal team are mostly based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. We also have a London office for Sprintlaw UK.

Our legal team is made up of experienced lawyers, who are specialists in various areas of law and hold an Australian legal practising certificate. None of our Sprintlaw lawyers are New Zealand qualified lawyers and they do not currently hold a New Zealand practising certificate.

They provide legal services working remotely from Australia via our 'legal consultancy' model, through which (under section 6 and section 35 of the New Zealand Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006) our Australian legal team are permitted to provide legal services to New Zealand businesses provided they do not provide services in certain 'reserved' areas of law. You can read our FAQ page to learn a bit more about our 'legal consultancy' model.

Given the strong similarities between Australian and New Zealand law, and the areas of law in which we practice (being small business and startup law), we do not view the fact that our lawyers have not qualified in New Zealand as having any substantive impact on the quality of our service. We are committed to ensuring that we provide high quality, affordable legal services to all our New Zealand clients.

Our legal team have all trained at leading firms, but have left the traditional corporate law world to join us on our mission to create a new and better way of delivering legal services. They have specialist expertise in technology law, intellectual property law, contract drafting and review, corporate law and commercial law.