Counseling the Client

When counseling a client, an antitrust lawyer must know the industrys structure, its dynamics, and its regulatory environment. For example, if you are involved in a pharmaceutical industry matter, you must understand the impact of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation on the process of new drug approvals , and of healthcare regulation that affects the pricing and reimbursement of products by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. You likely also will need to understand the effect and operation of the Waxman-Hatch Amendments to the food and drug laws regarding patent term extension and market exclusivity protections for drugs. You have to know the particular business and regulatory environment of your client. You simply cannot give antitrust advice in a vacuum and fail to take into account the specific context of the industry, which may radically alter conventional antitrust advice. Responding at such a high level of abstraction fails to give the practical assistance that the client needs.

It is also vitally important to make the complexity of antitrust understandable to the client. Antitrust lawyers can speak in a language that is fairly incomprehensible to our own clients , let alone others, who are not involved in the field. There are a lot of specialized terminology and concepts used in this area of the law, such as cross-elasticities of demand, game theoretic models, and market concentration indices, such as the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. As an antitrust lawyer, you have to be able to translate the law for the client so that he or she understands it, and interpret the law so that the advice you provide is both helpful and practical.