I've been involved in a lot of due diligence efforts, from the tech side but I've seen all angles of it as the deals are often fast and intense and the various teams have to often coordinate to a degree (tech, legal, financial, tax, etc).
It is fairly common for the people initiating the acquisition to really want to close it in a hurry, and they do due diligence only as a check mark in someone's list. As someone else here mentioned, there is enormous pressure to close, and any red flags are often redirected, reworded, or even occasionally just squashed.
The further away a company is from something like private equity, who does acquisitions like we eat breakfast every day, the more likely you are to see rushed and potentially botched due diligence. Someone like a big bank may well have the main proponent not know anything at all about acquisitions or due diligence, and just wants to "get 'er done".
It is also very common for people to come in after-the-fact and do a second diligence, and while doing that diligence to hear one or more people opening the conversation with "I warned them about this before the acquisition...".
At the end of the day, particularly in a big public corp, people are focused on their bonuses and total comp, and people like that aren't going into a due diligence looking for red flags and "no's".
It is fairly common for the people initiating the acquisition to really want to close it in a hurry, and they do due diligence only as a check mark in someone's list. As someone else here mentioned, there is enormous pressure to close, and any red flags are often redirected, reworded, or even occasionally just squashed.
The further away a company is from something like private equity, who does acquisitions like we eat breakfast every day, the more likely you are to see rushed and potentially botched due diligence. Someone like a big bank may well have the main proponent not know anything at all about acquisitions or due diligence, and just wants to "get 'er done".
It is also very common for people to come in after-the-fact and do a second diligence, and while doing that diligence to hear one or more people opening the conversation with "I warned them about this before the acquisition...".
At the end of the day, particularly in a big public corp, people are focused on their bonuses and total comp, and people like that aren't going into a due diligence looking for red flags and "no's".