Antitrust

Under the antitrust merger guidelines, a maverick is a firm “that plays a disruptive role in the market to the benefit of customers.” In Washington political circles, a maverick often refers to a politician that does not hew faithfully to the party line.

In 1997, most people thought of Amazon.com as mainly an online bookseller, you couldn't buy groceries at Wal-Mart or Target, and if you wanted floppy disks, VHS tapes, or a fax machine, you drove to your local Staples, OfficeMax, or Office Depot.

For over a decade, the antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission have challenged the type of patent settlement where a brand-name drug manufacturer pays a prospective generic manufacturer to settle patent challenges, and the generic manufacturer agrees not to bring its generic to market for a specified number of years.

Merger agreements often contain ancillary provisions that seem acceptable to the parties in the context of what they are obtaining from the transaction—and those provisions often do not get a hard look by antitrust legal advisors when the transaction is not reportable under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvement Act of 1976 (“HSR Act”).

In AT&T Mobility LLC v. AU Optronics Corp., Ninth Circuit Case No. 11-16188 (Feb. 14, 2013), the Ninth Circuit held that California’s antitrust law, the Cartwright Act, could apply to a price fixing conspiracy of LCD panels even though purchases of the price-fixed goods all occurred outside California.

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), much attention has been paid to the antitrust treatment of Accountable Care Organizations, provider ventures contemplated by the ACA that the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have said are, essentially, clinically integrated organizations.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on January 10, 2013 increased jurisdictional thresholds for premerger notification filings under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended (the HSR Act).