Competition Matters

Videos from the live webcast of our Jan. 19th event are now available.

Since 2004, brand-name and generic drug manufacturers have filed certain agreements with the FTC and DOJ as required by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (also known as MMA filings).

For many of us, the holiday season involves at least one loooong automobile ride. We travel over the river and through the woods in our beloved cars, our trunks stuffed with presents for family and friends. Today, the way we buy those presents and the way we buy the car that carries them look very different. While the retail landscape has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, the system of automobile sales in the United States has stayed mostly the same. Are consumers benefitting from the current distribution system for automobiles or are changes needed?

During an antitrust investigation, we often hear that our concerns fail to account for disruptive forces that will soon emerge and shake up the competitive dynamic in the market in the near future—from an innovative newcomer or from the emergence of a completely new business model.  I recently went to the Pacific Northwest, a hotbed of innovation and new ideas, to talk about the role of disruptive business models in U.S. antitrust analysis.

The Hart-Scott-Rodino statute and rules contain a number of reporting thresholds for transactions subject to premerger notification filing with the FTC and DOJ. In this post, we are going to focus on how to value publicly traded stock in order to determine reportability under the various filing thresholds. Some of the most frequent questions we get involve how to value acquisitions of voting securities in 801.30 transactions, given the volatile nature of the stock market.

What are the HSR notification thresholds for voting securities?

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners violated the federal antitrust laws by preventing non-dentists from providing teeth whitening services in competition with the state’s licensed dentists. N.C. State Bd. of Dental Exam’rs v. FTC, 135 S. Ct. 1101 (2015). The Board had argued that, because it is a state agency, it is exempt from liability under the federal antitrust laws.

It’s easy to be blasé about electric power: Flip a switch and the lights come on. Plug in your phone and it recharges. Maybe you have a vague sense that behind the plug is a vast infrastructure of lines and junction boxes, all leading back to far-away power plants that generate electricity. But new technologies and growing interest in ‘green’ energy sources are prompting policymakers to rethink public utility regulation – and suddenly, what happens behind that plug could get a whole lot more interesting.

Today the FTC and DOJ released the FY 2014 Hart-Scott-Rodino Annual Report, which details the agencies’ merger review and enforcement program for October 1, 2013 through September 30, 2014. As the only complete source of data on federal merger enforcement, the HSR Report is worth a close read, but here’s a little preview of our top four most interesting observations, trends, and takeaways from this year’s report.

Every day, the PNO receives many inquiries for interpretations of the Hart-Scott-Rodino statute and rules. Recently, several questions have related to transactions involving rental property, which implicate 16 C.F.R.