Author: Jarod Bona If, like me, you have ever spoken to someone that faces criminal indictment by a federal grand jury following a Justice Department antitrust investigation, you know why antitrust compliance counseling and training is a big deal—you don’t need reasons; hearing the crackle of the voice is enough…
Articles Posted in Department of Justice
Antitrust Compliance Programs in the US and the European Union
Author: Luis Blanquez Luis Blanquez is a European Competition Attorney that works with Bona Law. WHAT IS AN ANTITRUST COMPLIANCE PROGRAM? An antitrust compliance program is an internal business policy designed by a company to educate directors and employees to avoid risks of anticompetitive conduct. Companies that conspire with their…
Antitrust News: The International Competition Network Standardizes Due Process Principles for Antitrust and Competition Enforcement Agencies Worldwide
Author: Luis Blanquez The U.S. Department of Justice recently published that the International Competition Network (“ICN”) has approved the Framework on Competition Agency Procedures (“CAP”), for antitrust enforcement agencies around the world to promote fundamental due process principles in competition law investigations and enforcement. This is an opt-in framework, based…
Antitrust News: The Oscars’ Proposed Ban on Netflix Movies Raises Antitrust Concerns
Author: Aaron Gott My morning routine usually begins with reading the news to keep up on current events. As an antitrust lawyer, I often find myself thinking about how stories that were deemed newsworthy for other reasons fail to recognize their often most troubling aspects: the antitrust concerns. Last week,…
Antitrust News: The Department of Justice Supports a Market-Participant Exception to State-Action Immunity in No-Poaching Agreement Case Against Duke University
Author: Jarod Bona It is illegal under the antitrust laws for competitors to agree not to steal each others’ employees. For more about that, you can read our article about how the antitrust laws encourage stealing. Yes, you read that correctly. But this article isn’t about stealing or even agreeing…
Procedural Fairness in Antitrust and Competition Enforcement: DOJ and the ICN
Author: Luis Blanquez Makan Delrahim, Antitrust Chief for the United States Department of Justice, made news on June 1, 2018, when he announced that the United States will finalize and join the Multilateral Framework on Procedures in Competition Law Investigation and Enforcement. Delrahim explained why due process is a priority…
The Antitrust Laws Do Not Allow Real Estate Agents to Jointly Fix or Set Prices or Commissions
If you have sold or purchased a home recently, you might be under the impression that real estate commissions—the price to engage a real estate broker—are fixed or otherwise set by law in different geographic markets. They aren’t—to do so amounts to price-fixing, which is a per se violation of…
The Antitrust Pleading Standard Is Shifting Back Toward the Plaintiff
Author: Jarod Bona In 2007, the Supreme Court issued a bombshell of a case called Bell Atlantic v. Twombly, which caused both antitrust lawyers and civil procedure law professors to rethink how they go about their work. For those of you not obsessed with law or antitrust, Twombly changed the…
Hospitals, Antitrust, the Department of Justice, and Agreements to Not Compete on Marketing
What is great about practicing antitrust law is that you take deep dives into the intricacies of different markets from the shelf space in drug stores for condoms—an actual case from several years ago—to insurance brokerage pricing to processed eggs and everything in between. There are, however, certain industries that…
Can You Make Money From an Antitrust Hedge Fund?
So here’s an idea. Let me know what you think: A hedge fund or other investment vehicle centered on antitrust analysis. I’ll explain. As you might know, I am an antitrust attorney. And I write a blog on antitrust and competition law. So, as you may expect, I follow antitrust…