An Antitrust Takeover
While antitrust lawyers don't like collusion, around 3,000 of them certainly had a monopoly on floor space at the JW Marriott for the recent ABA Antitrust Spring Meeting. We snapped this gathering between dozens of panels and parties over the course of several days, which also spilled over next door to the National Press Club (where we caught FTC Commissioner Julie Brill, HSBC SVP Al Silipigni, and DOJ CPO Erika Brown Lee). The conference was chaired by Skadden's Sharis Pozen and WilmerHale's Hartmut Schneider. O'Melveny's Rich Parker—who chairs the firm's antitrust group and negotiated a settlement for US Airways after DOJ attempted to block its merger with American Airlines—gave us a few trends he sees: the government's willingness to go to court means companies should accept significant remedies or prep for trial; patents—to what extent can antitrust deal with that, he asks; clashes around mergers in healthcare (apparently the gift that keeps on giving for every area of law); and pharma clashes between branded and generic.
