The Qualities of the Successful Antitrust Practitioner

Daniel M. Wall
Chair, Global Antitrust & Competition Practice
Latham & Watkins LLP

The Basics of Antitrust Law

Antitrust law combines the common law approach of case law with economic theory. It reflects an evolving balance between legal and economic concepts, although it is more weighted toward economics today than ever. This is a relatively recent development, having picked up increasing steam over the last 20 years . It has transformed the practice in nearly every respect. Nevertheless, antitrust still also involves traditional common law concepts that every lawyer learns during the first year of law school.

At a practical level, antitrust law is an amalgam of government policy pronouncements, prosecution decisions, judicial decisions and private complaints. There is a whole ecosystem of actors in the antitrust world that are clashing, creating new issues, resolving them and starting the process all over again.

Antitrust laws reflect the philosophy that rivalry among economic actors benefits the consumer and society at large better than government regulation. Because of that, I consider antitrust laws to be anti-regulatory laws. They are based on the belief that if you let people compete independently on their own merits, the consequences will be good enough that we do not need to resort to other, more intrusive kinds of regulation.

There is also a philosophical element to antitrust. The Sherman Act is very much an expression of one of the treasured American philosophies (even if it is by no means unique to Americans), namely that an individual should be able to succeed or fail without the help of others. Antitrust expresses American individualism in an economic setting.