Accelerate Due Diligence
How Aracor Helps In-House Counsel Navigate M&A Complexity and Save 85% of Review Time
Richard Christesen is the Senior Commercial and Corporate Counsel at Constructor Group, a multi-faceted ecosystem dedicated to advancing the fields of science, education, and technology. Motivated by Constructor Theory, the Group combines educational initiatives, research capabilities, and commercial services to support the next generation of technological breakthroughs designed to address tomorrow’s challenges.
Since joining in 2022, Richard has played a central role in managing, interpreting, drafting, and negotiating commercial agreements, international compliance matters, and complex mergers and acquisitions. His work spans privacy law, regulatory navigation, and cross-border transaction structuring in high-stakes legal environments.
The Challenge: Aligning Legal Language With Actual Deal Intent
During a critical investment restructuring involving Constructor Capital, Richard encountered a high-risk legal issue: a growing disconnect between the stated commercial understanding of the transaction and the legal language used to implement it.
Executive summaries and deal discussions suggested that Constructor would participate in future share transactions. However, when Richard analyzed the underlying shareholder agreements, amended articles, and investor rights provisions together, the operative language pointed toward a different outcome entirely.
This was not a simple drafting inconsistency or a missing definition. The issue emerged from the interaction between multiple provisions across multiple documents, where subtle wording shifts altered how rights would function in practice. Left unresolved, the structure could have materially limited Constructor’s participation in future liquidity events despite the broader understanding reflected elsewhere in the transaction.
Richard had already spent nearly ten hours reviewing documentation internally, consulting with peers, and engaging opposing counsel. Interpretations varied, but clarity remained elusive. Individual clauses could be explained in isolation, yet the logic of the transaction as a whole remained difficult to reconcile.
The core issue became increasingly clear:
Why did the documents operationalize the transaction differently than the deal summary described?
Answering that question required more than contract review. It required a system capable of analyzing how obligations, triggers, rights structures, and transactional intent interacted across the full deal architecture.
The Aracor Approach: One Platform Built for the Deal
Richard turned to Aracor, a secure dealmaking platform designed to unify due diligence, negotiation, verification, stakeholders, oversight, and transaction records into one continuously updated system.
Aracor’s flagship function is due diligence, but its role extends beyond document review. The platform functions as infrastructure for the deal itself—keeping information structured, evidence-linked, and synchronized across the transaction lifecycle. As the transaction evolves, Aracor becomes a system of record for the evolution of the deal: one source of truth for the documents, diligence findings, negotiation history, verification work, stakeholder context, and post-signing continuity that define how the transaction actually takes shape.
Rather than reviewing documents in isolation, Richard used Aracor to examine how the agreements functioned collectively:
- Comparing interdependent clauses across multiple agreements
- Testing whether legal implementation aligned with stated transaction intent
- Identifying where rights structures diverged operationally from summaries
- Evaluating how small wording changes affected downstream governance and liquidity outcomes
- Requesting narrowly tailored revisions designed to preserve the commercial structure without unnecessarily redrafting agreements
The process was iterative and analytical. Richard was able to interrogate the transaction dynamically, exploring how provisions interacted under different scenarios and tracing legal consequences across the broader structure of the deal.
Most importantly, Aracor helped surface issues that traditional review workflows struggled to isolate because the problem did not exist within a single clause. It existed in the relationship between documents.
As Richard explained:
“Aracor helped identify subtle but critical wording changes—something we couldn’t bring to the surface even after 10 hours of review and back-and-forth with counsel.”
By keeping the transaction evidence-linked and synchronized across documents, Aracor enabled Richard to move beyond fragmented review and toward structural clarity.
Designed by an attorney and dealmakers who were frustrated by fragmented workflows and the amount of time spent doing “work about the work,” Aracor was built from real-world transactional pressure within the broader Constructor ecosystem. The result is a platform focused on faster diligence, clearer risk visibility, stronger continuity, and one synchronized source of truth for every stakeholder relevant to the transaction.
Security is continuously monitored because proprietary transaction information is among the highest-value assets entrusted to any system. For in-house counsel working across sensitive deal materials, governance questions, investor rights, and post-signing obligations, Aracor provides the secure infrastructure needed to keep the deal record organized, traceable, and aligned as the transaction develops.
The Results: Faster Diligence, Stronger Positioning, Clearer Outcomes
Using Aracor, Richard was able to significantly accelerate review while strengthening Constructor’s legal and strategic position during negotiations.
85%+ Reduction in Review Time. A review cycle that had already consumed multiple rounds of analysis and consultation was reduced to under two hours once the relevant transactional relationships were surfaced and validated through the platform.
Negotiation Time Dramatically Reduced. A complex multi-party negotiation call expected to last several hours concluded in approximately 45 minutes because the core structural issues had already been isolated and clarified beforehand.
Transaction Rights Preserved. Targeted revisions to operative language ensured that Constructor would not be inadvertently excluded from future liquidity participation, bringing the legal implementation back into alignment with actual deal intent.
Stronger Legal Positioning. Because the analysis focused on how the transaction functioned as an integrated system—not simply how individual clauses read in isolation—Richard was able to negotiate from a position of greater precision, clarity, and confidence.
Continuity Beyond Signing. The diligence intelligence generated during review did not disappear once negotiations concluded. Instead, it became part of the ongoing operational blueprint surrounding the transaction, preserving continuity and institutional understanding after execution.
Beyond efficiency gains, Aracor provided something more fundamental: confidence that the transaction record accurately reflected the intended economics and governance structure of the deal.
Testimonial
“With Aracor, I didn’t just save time—I closed the M&A transparency gap that even experienced counsel couldn’t articulate. It gave us clarity, leverage, and speed in a critical moment. It’s like having a second brain focused entirely on the logic of the deal.”
— Richard Christesen, Senior Commercial & Corporate Counsel, Constructor Group