Essential Capabilities of the Antitrust Practitioner

An antitrust lawyer needs to have three skills. First, he or she has to have a very high level knowledge of antitrust, which includes both antitrust law and antitrust economics. Second, he or she needs to have knowledge of the company being represented, the regulatory and business environment in which the company operates, and the structure and dynamics of its market. Third, an antitrust lawyer must have the ability to integrate this knowledge and apply it with common sense, to give clear, helpful and practical suggestions and provide creative resolutions for transactions and litigation.

Seeing through complexity is the hallmark of an outstanding antitrust lawyer. It is easy to become overwhelmed by complicated facts and regulatory environments and simply advise the client that the risks are unmanageable. An effective antitrust lawyer needs to be able to see the way to creative solutions to complex problems in a complex environment.

To a large extent, developments in technology have altered the types of activity engaged in by antitrust lawyers. It used to be that clients would ask us to find information about their industry, how their industry was considered from a competition standpoint, whether there were prior cases which involved their industry, and the current views of the enforcement agencies. We often were asked to find speeches and comments that were recently given about their specific problem by relevant enforcement agencies. Now, clients can and do obtain all of that information themselves on the Internet. Clients simply do not ask us for that type of information anymore. Today, antitrust lawyers instead serve our clients by making sense of the incredibly voluminous amounts of material that they often have already obtained. The antitrust lawyer then organizes, analyzes, distills, simplifies and clarifies this information for the client, and provides proposed resolutions that are practical from a business standpoint.

Presently, the biggest problem for analysis is that there is more information available than people know what to do with. Therefore, while technology has increased our ability to obtain information, the amount of information available actually has made the analytical process more difficult. As a result, that makes simplifying complexity the hallmark of a great antitrust lawyer, to a greater degree than ever before.