Global insights. One firm
Veronica Roberts

What are the main lessons or issues in your practice area you'd want to stress to clients?

It's important for all our clients to understand the scope of competition and antitrust rules that could apply to them in practice and ensure that an appropriate compliance policy is in place, without being over-cautious. This should be reflected across all levels in the company, from the board down to junior employees, in verbal and written communications. 

What are the major trends across your practice the moment?

Competition and antitrust issues continue to be a top priority for many companies and investors.  When doing deals, it is not unusual for a raft of filings, both merger control and foreign direct investment, to be required, which needs to be factored into the deal timing and strategy. This is the case for minority investments as well as mergers and full acquisitions. Merger control authorities are increasingly interested in private equity investors pursuing roll-up strategies, acquiring a number of smaller companies in the same market. With the trend of increasing enforcement, competition and antitrust, compliance is also key, whether that's ensuring commercial contracts comply with the rules and, for those companies that have significant market power, ensuring they don't fall foul of rules on the abuse of dominance. We are also seeing many more class actions in the space, which means compliance is more important than ever.

How do you see these trends developing?

In the UK, we have recently seen the government changing the Chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and introducing a new Strategic Steer for the CMA. This places firm emphasis on the CMA acting in a way that prioritises growth and investment in the UK, as well as continuing to focus on harms that impact UK-based consumers and businesses in its enforcement activity. The CMA is required to act quickly and proportionately and has new enforcement tools at its disposal, including the new digital markets regime and direct consumer enforcement powers. So, although we expect to see the CMA supporting the government in its pro-growth agenda, we also expect to see more interventions from the CMA going forward, which in turn will likely lead to more competition class actions.

Our FDI regime [the National Security and Investment regime] has now been operational for over three years and is one of the most active regimes in Europe, with around 900 filings per year. The vast majority are cleared at the end of the first review period, but companies do still need to await clearance of mandatory filings before proceeding with deals. We continue to deal with some of the cases where the government does have national security concerns and sometimes requires remedies/mitigation. This work will only increase, given the ever-changing geopolitical landscape.

Veronica Roberts is the UK regional head of practice, competition, regulation and trade, based in London