Alacrita Consulting

Alacrita

Alacrita is a rapidly growing, transatlantic management consulting firm providing expertise-based services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and life science sectors. The firm is comprised of a seasoned team of specialists with extensive international industry experience (strategic, technical, and commercial) and broad functional capabilities. Alacrita has an impressive track record of success working across the full spectrum of the life sciences industry from product innovation and development to commercialization. The firm helps clients in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries across the deal lifecycle, including new company formation, M&A strategy, sourcing new deals and technologies, positioning assets to maximize value, technology assessments and due diligence, and negotiation tactics and support.

Situation

A significant portion of Alacrita’s business is providing partnering strategy support, performing due diligence and helping life sciences companies execute licensing or M&A transactions. As with any deal, information must remain private and secure throughout the process. This is all the more crucial in the life sciences industry, where parties are exchanging intellectual property and unpublished patents. Alacrita represents a number of clients who are smaller companies, as well as universities seeking to sell their biotech and pharma technologies to larger enterprises.

Alacrita had experience using virtual data rooms (VDRs) and recognized their value in helping to share an immense amount of information and facilitate collaboration, but had some frustrations when parties on the buy-side were not able to access the unsecure solutions they were using at the time. The firm sought a VDR that was easy to use and access – anywhere, anytime – but would also meet the industry’s most stringent security requirements.

Solution

Co-founder and Managing Partner Rob Johnson was familiar with Intralinks, having utilized the tool in the past when representing buy-side clients, and was impressed with its capabilities. Therefore, when it was time to set up a VDR for a new sell-side client in March 2015, he immediately turned to Intralinks. Trusted around the globe to successfully execute over 5,500 transactions annually and with more than 3.3 million registered users, Intralinks is the industry’s most immersive and secure means of sharing sensitive, confidential, and regulated content outside of the enterprise during the deal making process.

According to Johnson, from day one, Alacrita has had a “tremendously positive experience with Intralinks.” Set up for the data room was virtually effortless and very intuitive, and eliminated the administrative burden of having to create individual sites for multiple buyers. When you consider that there are often as many as 12 investors involved in deals at any given time, this significantly streamlines the process. On top of that, the amount of information generated for each deal varies enormously, but the average biotech or pharmaceutical company transaction can require a high volume of complex documentation – all of which must be protected.

“Documents absolutely must not be saved, printed or shared via consumer-grade or unencrypted content management or collaboration tools because document security is of the upmost importance,” added Johnson. This is uniquely addressed by one of the key features of Intralinks, its built-in Information Rights Management (IRM) document locking and protection, and dynamic watermarking. This prevents the saving and sharing of files outside of the platform.

“Intralinks is our preferred virtual data room provider. Intralinks significantly expedites due diligence and the deal making process, but it’s equally important to us that the company pioneered the VDR market and its solutions are trusted by some of best-known brands and innovators around the globe – all of which have rigorous security requirements like ours.”

Benefits

Intralinks is providing Alacrita with highest caliber of security available on the market, but the benefits don’t stop there. Since deploying the Intralinks’ platform, the firm has seen significant productivity gains. Johnson estimates that Intralinks has improved efficiency by 30 percent, empowering his team to:

• Accelerate due diligence by automating tasks and considerably reducing timelines, file distribution issues, and market and operational risk.
• Make quicker, more-informed decisions, by facilitating the flow of information, and giving Alacrita the ability to quickly and effectively respond to bidder and legal requests through streamlined Q&A.
• Monitor the deal process in real time via up-to-date progress tracking and workflow transparency through dashboards and reporting tools.
• Manage all aspects of a transaction, including adding new documents and users, via a secure mobile application.