A decision to watch for this year is the Eighth Circuit’s pending consideration of FTC v. Lundbeck, Inc., 2010-2 Trade Cases ¶77,160; 2010 WL 3810015 (D. Minn. Aug. 31, 2010). (While I helped draft an amicus brief in that case, on behalf of the American Antitrust Institute, the views here are strictly my own.) If…
Soon after Jon Leibowitz became the head of the Federal Trade Commission in March 2009, he told attendees of the American Bar Association’s Section of Antitrust Law Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C. that they could expect continuity in enforcement at the agency. Leibowitz’s recent nomination to serve another seven years at the Commission points to…
The FTC has suffered a setback in its challenge to Laboratory Corporation of America’s acquisition of Westcliff Medical Laboratories, Inc. The federal district court in Santa Ana, California, on February 22 denied the agency’s request for a preliminary injunction to prevent integration of the firms pending the outcome of an administrative trial challenging the transaction….
News headlines suggesting an uptick in merger activity in 2010 were validated by the Federal Trade Commission’s 33rd “Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Annual Report,” which was released today by the FTC with the concurrence of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. According to the report, the number of transactions notified to the federal antitrust agencies grew by…
The Federal Trade Commission has issued a press release announcing the appointment of Theodore L. Banks, Esq., to monitor Coca-Cola Company’s compliance with the FTC order settling charges that the company’s acquisition of Coca-Cola Enterprises, its largest North American bottler, would be anticompetitive. The order requires Coca-Cola to restrict its access to confidential competitive business…
The FTC’s efforts to substantially revise the Horizontal Merger Guidelines for the first time since 1992 were among the recent agency accomplishments touted by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in remarks delivered last week to attendees of Georgetown Law School’s Fourth Annual Global Antitrust Enforcement Symposium and Fordham Competition Law Institute’s International Antitrust Law & Policy…
The Federal Trade Commission recently suffered a significant setback in its merger enforcement efforts when the federal district court in Minneapolis rejected an action brought by the agency along with the State of Minnesota against global pharmaceutical company Lundbeck, Inc. In December 2008, the FTC and Minnesota filed a complaint against Ovation Pharmaceuticals, Inc., which…
In response to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission into suspicious customer reviews posted on an online store’s website, a public relations firm and its sole owner agreed to remove the reviews from the website and refrain from misrepresenting their status in customer reviews. The pubic relations firm provided sales, marketing, and public relations…
