  Recent advances in the description of compact binary systems have produced
gravitational waveforms that include inspiral, merger and ring-down phases.
Comparing results from numerical simulations with those of post-Newtonian (PN),
and related, expansions has provided motivation for employing PN waveforms in
near merger epochs when searching for gravitational waves and has encouraged
the development of analytic fits to full numerical waveforms. The models and
simulations do not yet cover the full binary coalescence parameter space. For
these yet un-simulated regions, data analysts can still conduct separate
inspiral, merger and ring-down searches. Improved knowledge about the end of
the inspiral phase, the beginning of the merger, and the ring-down frequencies
could increase the efficiency of both coherent inspiral-merger-ring-down (IMR)
searches and searches over each phase separately. Insight can be gained for all
three cases through a recently presented theoretical calculation, which,
corroborated by the numerical results, provides an implicit formula for the
final spin of the merged black holes, accurate to within 10% over a large
parameter space. Knowledge of the final spin allows one to predict the end of
the inspiral phase and the quasinormal mode ring-down frequencies, and in turn
provides information about the bandwidth and duration of the merger. In this
work we will discuss a few of the implications of this calculation for data
analysis.
