Publication
Road to COP29: Our insights
The 28th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP28) took place on November 30 - December 12 in Dubai.
Publication | December 2023
On December 18, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ) (together, Agencies) released updated Merger Guidelines (Guidelines). The Guidelines amend, replace and consolidate the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines and the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. The Guidelines are not legally binding but provide some predictability to the antitrust bar and merging parties when evaluating the antitrust risk of proposed transactions.
The Agencies previewed draft Guidelines on July 19, 2023. The Guidelines have since been updated after a two-month period in which the Agencies received more than 30,000 comments to incorporate recent case law (after facing criticism that the draft Guidelines ignored decades of recent precedent), provide more clarity, and remove some of the structural presumptions advanced in the earlier draft. The Guidelines reflect and are consistent with positions the Agencies have been taking in recent years.
The final Guidelines, which reflect softened language on some topics, retain their emphasis on transactions that tend to create a monopoly, focus on mergers that may limit rivals’ access to inputs or lead to sharing of competitively sensitive information, advance new theories of harm relating to competition in labor markets, codify aggressive new thresholds for what transactions the Agencies view as presumptively illegal and formalize a new focus on cross-market effects and serial acquisitions.
The Agencies past merger guidelines are frequently cited by courts in Section 7 cases—the Agencies are likely to cite these guidelines in challenges in the coming year in the hope that courts adopt their tighter thresholds as law.
Publication
The 28th Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP28) took place on November 30 - December 12 in Dubai.
Publication
Miranda Cole, Julien Haverals and Emma Clarke of our Brussels/ London offices are the authors of a chapter on procedural issues in merger control that has been published in the third edition of the Global Competition Review’s The Guide to Life Sciences. This covers a number of significant procedural developments that have affected merger review of life sciences transactions.
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