Due Diligence and the Legal Sector: A Changing Environment
By KCS Group Europe & Squire Patton Boggs
The nature, role and importance of due diligence has fluctuated over time. Around 500 years ago, when the phrase first entered common use, it was defined only as “requisite effort” in a business transaction, which is very mutable verbiage. Over the centuries, the words took on an increasingly legal dimension before a fact-finding component was codified in the US Securities Act of 1933 as “reasonable investigation”
