Electronic documents change the way competition authorities search for documents when carrying out inspections. But that doesn’t mean that companies are worse off than before. In days past Commission officials on inspections occasionally found lever arch files labelled “Cartel Minutes”. Even in the last ten years, the Commission uncovered a cartel that operated on the basis of a written cartel agreement. This generous aid to the Commission’s investigations rarely happens today: cartelists have become more careful, and electronic documents have largely replaced paper ones. It’s this latter point that I want to touch on here. As companies have increasingly moved to electronic documents rather than paper ones, so Commission investigative practices have similarly had to move towards searching electronic evidence. […]
From CPI RSS: Reverse Payment Settlements in the United States and Europe: Moving Toward An Effects-Based Approach “ After more than a decade of debate and complex litigation on "reverse payment" settlements, the Supreme Court ruled on the issue in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. The pharmaceutical industry now asks: So, are those settlements lawful? The Actavis Court’s answer: "Maybe . . . sometimes." The lower courts are now commissioned to apply the decades-old rule of reason to reverse payment settlements and, in the process, to advance important antitrust and intellectual property interests. At almost the same time that the Supreme Court issued the Actavis decision, the European Commission announced its Lundbeck decision that found a collection of reverse payment […]
From Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog: Taking the Error Out of “Error Cost” Analysis: What’s Wrong with Antitrust’s Right “Jon Baker (American) has a great paper on Taking the Error Out of "Error Cost" Analysis: What’s Wrong with Antitrust’s Right. I heard the presentation of the paper at Yale on Friday. It is worth a download.”
From Competition Bulletin: A family affair: parental liability for joint ventures “It is trite law that a parent company will be liable for antitrust infringements committed by a subsidiary where the parent exercises “decisive influence” over the conduct of the subsidiary. Earlier this year the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) illustrated just how difficult it will be for a company to rebut the […]”