The Announced M&A Deal is the Worst Lead You'll Get All Year

Why M&A announcements are a misleading signal for anyone trying to originate contract review work — and what actually predicts demand.

My first assignment out of law school was monitoring M&A deals.

I used a web tool that aggregated deal announcements and made them easily searchable: mergers, acquisitions, and similar types of corporate transactions. It allowed searching and filtering by various criteria, including the deal size, type, advisors, etc.

I scoured for large deals as part of…