Our antitrust and competition lawyers also have a deep bench of industry and market-specific knowledge and experience. As your business evolves and you expand into new markets, bringing about new challenges, we can help you design innovative, forward-thinking solutions tailored to meet your specific business needs. We are keenly focused on building strategies that bridge the gap between legal requirements and commercial objectives. Our top priority is to support your company and its antitrust needs, including:

Merger control, FDI and transactional support

Our approach to merger control and FDI clearance is a fluid, efficient process led by highly experienced competition lawyers who anticipate key issues and resolve them swiftly, ensuring that our clients are able push their deals through successfully and efficiently. Our clients often involve us at the outset of a deal, when we work with them to conduct extensive due diligence and help to outline any potential competition issues as early as possible. Our team of recognized, market-leading competition lawyers spans key jurisdictions in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the United States. Alongside our jurisdiction-specific expertise, we are particularly well-placed to lead complex, multi-jurisdictional merger cases. Our global team also has successfully advised clients in highly complex merger cases across various industries, including energy, transportation, pharmaceuticals, health care, financial services, manufacturing, media and technology.

Antitrust investigations

Our lawyers are highly experienced in representing clients being investigated as a target or third party for alleged antitrust breaches, including price fixing, bid rigging, boycotting, market allocation, monopolization and abuse of dominance, and other types of anticompetitive agreements across a wide array of sectors. Our team assists both companies and individuals through all aspects of government and internal investigations, from initial dawn raids, information gathering, response strategies and damages mitigation, through to robust defense of allegations against them. Our lawyers have served as counsel in dozens of civil and criminal government antitrust investigations, class actions, mediations and trials, and have defended numerous companies in disputes involving alleged infringements of competition law.

Civil litigation and class actions

Antitrust litigation raises unique, high-stakes challenges and risks for the parties. The scale of damage claims can result in the possibility of billions of dollars of exposure. The factual and legal issues can be extremely complex, requiring substantial discovery and intense expert work, often relating to the parties’ most sensitive business information and strategies, and sometimes taking many years to litigate. Litigating antitrust cases can be very expensive and a significant management distraction while also resulting in negative publicity. Class actions can also dramatically increase the risk of increased costs for defendants. Our team has deep experience defending large-scale antitrust class actions and other complex antitrust cases brought under federal and state antitrust and unfair competition laws, including cartel and monopolization/dominance issues, as well as merger challenges, Section 1 cases, and cases brought under various state antitrust laws.

Antitrust counseling and compliance

Our approach to competition compliance is to build a robust program that matches the industry, risks and culture of our clients. Our industry expertise, coupled with working in close partnership with our clients’ in-house compliance leads, allows us to truly tailor our compliance offering to fit a particular client’s specific needs. We have a range of tools available which allow us to meet varying business needs, from in-person training and online compliance programs to compliance audits and more specialized, targeted forms of training. Our team regularly provides practical and commercial advice to clients on key strategic projects as well as day-to-day business activities, to minimize antitrust exposure. Our expertise includes advising multinational clients engaged in the production and sale of products on marketing and distribution, as well as advice on the franchising and distribution of goods and services, termination disputes, pricing and discount structures, cooperation between competitors, prevention of cartel infringements, public procurement and challenges to the propriety of the supply and distribution systems chosen by our clients.

State aid

Our antitrust team has extensive experience in assisting clients navigate the complex risks associated with state aid and government support. We help businesses obtain government support and benefit from public funding initiatives in a compliant way. Lately, support measures relating to sustainability initiatives in the framework of the EU Green Deal or in response to the COVID-19 crisis have been new areas of focus. We have extensively advised clients on the risks associated with state aid in connection with M&A transactions, privatizations and investments in infrastructure and on how to put the necessary safeguards in place to ensure compliance. We also regularly represent clients in EU Commission investigations and before national or European courts, both defending beneficiaries of state aid and launching state aid complaints for companies suffering from a distortion caused by state aid granted to competitors.