Professional notice
Lear
Lear continues to focus on abuse of dominance and cartel cases, and was involved in six proceedings before competition authorities.
- Counts several major Italian companies as regular clients
- Assisted a major Italian broadcaster involved in an investigation by Italy’s Antitrust Authority for an alleged anticompetitive agreement in the market for football TV rights
- Helping a major fruit packager in assessing damages from alleged participation in a cartel, investigated by the Spanish competition authority
| Global heads | Paolo Buccirossi |
| Home jurisdiction | Italy |
| Total size of firm | 9 |
| Competition economists | 9 |
| % of firm specialised | 100% |
| Who’s Who Legal: Competition nominees | 1 |
| Group one | 1 |
| Group two | 1 |
| Group three | 3 |
| Group four | 4 |
| Lateral hires | 0 |
| Departures | 1 |
| Internal promotions | 0 |
Italian economics boutique Lear is led by Who’s Who Legal: Competition nominee Paolo Buccirossi. The small group has remained busy this past year, advising several leading Italian companies on behavioural competition issues. For example, it helped telecoms company Wind to quantify the damages suffered in two abuse of dominance cases against incumbent Telecom Italia. Both follow-on actions from an investigation by Italy’s Antitrust Authority ended in 2015 with out-of-court settlements. The consultancy is also helping to defend Procter & Gamble against allegations that the company fixed the price of health and beauty products.
In other work, Lear has performed a detailed quantitative assessment for the Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers and Markets regarding the effects of three sequential merger decisions involving competing supermarkets chains. Lear’s team identified and collected all the relevant data on the affected markets, as well as developed a methodology to assess the effect of the mergers on prices, product variety and ancillary services. Additionally, the European Commission’s directorate-general for competition retained Lear, along with DIW Berlin and Analysys Mason, to study the economic impact of competition policy enforcement in the EU telecoms markets.