Professional notice
United States: Washington, DC
With seven partners and nine other attorneys dedicated to antitrust, AKIN GUMP STRAUSS HAUER & FELD’s DC team has expanded significantly in recent years. The firm represents Wilhelmsen, a global maritime company, in its acquisition of Drew Marine, a competitor in the supply of marine chemicals, as well as acting for 7-Eleven in its $3.3 billion acquisition of more than 1,000 Sunoco convenience stores and gas stations. Akin Gump also serves as lead antitrust counsel to AT&T for its pre-close integration planning efforts in connection with its mergers and acquisitions for all of its recent significant transactions, including its acquisitions of Time Warner and DIRECTV. The team also represented US Concrete in a class action brought by purchasers of ready-mix concrete and got US Concrete dismissed from the case and the complaint limited to a two-year period for the remaining defendants.
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP’s antitrust/competition practice is headquartered in Washington, DC, but has practitioners around the world, including in the United Kingdom and China. This allows our practitioners to stay on top of the current political, regulatory and legal climate as it pertains to antitrust law, which in turn enables our practitioners to deliver timely advice on agency and judicial action as well as ahead-of-the-curve advice on likely doctrinal developments and policy directions. Our lawyers are prominent in the antitrust bar; they hold multiple leadership positions in the American Bar Association; they have a record of public service; and they work on leading-edge litigation, enforcement, M&A and criminal matters. Recognised by leading industry publications, our antitrust practitioners have developed a reputation for their creativity and ability to work collaboratively to clear deals globally in less time than similar deals, and to successfully litigate complex cases.
We have served as lead antitrust counsel on numerous simultaneous high-stakes, high-value (US$1 billion-plus) transactions with significant levels of complexity. Although our team is lean, in the past 18 months, we have completed three extensive second request investigations (7-Eleven/Sunoco, Mars/VCA and Wilhelmsen/Drew, a deal which we also litigated against the FTC). We also had a significant role in part of the second request investigation into the AT&T/Time Warner transaction. We have developed innovative and creative solutions to facilitate regulatory approval more quickly and with less resources, despite increasingly aggressive and unpredictable antitrust enforcement. Our confidence in our methodologies enables Akin Gump’s antitrust practice to offer innovative risk-sharing arrangements that reward clients and our practice when we deliver results while providing predictable costs on bet-the-company matters.
Akin Gump’s antitrust lawyers have extensive litigation experience and have defended civil class action lawsuits and other private suits alleging joint conduct, monopolisation, intellectual property and vertical distribution issues, including multidistrict litigation, class actions, and cases following on government civil and criminal prosecutions. Our team also defends civil and criminal investigations, not only in antitrust matters, but also in those involving related competition laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the False Claims Act (FCA) and consumer protection laws. We appear regularly before the US Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general, and federal regulatory agencies on antitrust and competition matters.
Our practice is international in scope; we provide the full suite of antitrust and competition-related service involving mergers and acquisitions affecting more than 120 jurisdictions, criminal representations (eg, cartel investigations in the US, the EU and the NCA), and litigation crossing national boundaries (eg, before the US, the EC and the CMA, among others). We actively provide advice on a range of legislative and public policy matters, offering integrated substantive and legislative solutions with members of our public law and policy members with specific antitrust experience. In collaboration with other leading Akin Gump practices, we have developed a particular strength for handling cases at the intersection of antitrust and intellectual property, advising retail clients on the federal regulatory landscape, guiding healthcare clients on all aspects of their businesses, assisting energy clients across upstream, midstream and downstream matters, and a niche practice of advising various funds clients on antitrust cases and acquisitions.