Due Diligence: Knowing Who's Under Your Roof

Jonathan Nilsen, Counsel, Spire Corporation, USA

Invariably in international commercial contracts, there comes a time when all of the boilerplate clauses, the indemnification agreements, and liquidated damages provisions don’t anticipate every bump in the road. At that point, the parties must extend a certain amount of ‘trust’ to their potential business partner. Such ‘trust’ is extended in the commercially reasonable sense, in that it is not extended blindly, but rather is based on each party possessing some understanding of the base nature, personality, and character of the other party. Some businesses rely on the ‘gut feelings’ or instinct of those on the front lines of the transaction. This article instead discusses a more methodical and defensible method of gaining increased transparency into any proposed business partner via systems of background checks and redundancy searches in order to uncover potential issues that could undermine the relationship.

Jonathan Nilsen is a USA corporate attorney with more than twelve (12) years of experience. He has been advising a global, publicly-traded solar corporation for more than four (4) years. Prior to that, Mr. Nilsen had provided consultant legal corporate litigation defense services to some of Boston's most reputable law firms

Spire Corporation - Spire is the leading global solar company providing capital equipment to manufacture PV modules & cells, turnkey solar manufacturing lines and PV systems. Spire has provided innovative solar technologies for over 30 years. Spire also provides innovative R&D solutions, advanced surface modification for the biomedical industry, and is a PV systems provider to federal and commercial markets in the USA.