Insights

Washington – August 15, 2024: The 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 42 Crowell & Moring lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 29 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

Washington – June 21, 2024: Human Rights First honored Crowell & Moring lawyers Alexis Gilman, Tai Williams, Lauren Fleming, and Amber Gonzales with the Pro Bono Star Award in recognition of their teamwork and extraordinary commitment to representing and protecting asylum seekers. The group was honored at Human Rights First’s World Refugee Day Open House on June 20 in Washington, D.C.

Washington – June 6, 2024: Crowell & Moring earned 78 rankings for 67 lawyers, as well as 41 national and statewide practice area rankings, in the Chambers USA 2024 guide. The rankings are driven by independent interviews of clients and lawyers at peer firms.

On March 18, President Trump fired the Federal Trade Commission’s two Democratic Commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. The move represents the latest effort by the Trump administration to exert greater control over executive-branch agencies, including bi-partisan independent agencies like the FTC.

The Southern District of Texas published an unsealed version of its January 31, 2025 opinion denying the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin Tempur Sealy’s acquisition of Mattress Firm. The decision marks another loss for vertical merger enforcement efforts, particularly agency efforts to block these deals outright rather than accept settlement “fixes.” This case—coupled with other agency losses like AT&T/Time Warner and Microsoft/Activision—will likely make it even more difficult for enforcers to win vertical merger challenges, particularly when the merging parties lack sufficient market share to foreclose competitors and offer remedies to fix the alleged competitive concerns.

Four days before the change in administration and in the wake of several high-profile trial losses in cases involving alleged “no-poach” and wage-fixing agreements, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ) jointly approved new guidelines, Antitrust Guidelines for Business Activities Affecting Workers” (the “2025 Guidelines” or “Guidelines”), that explain how antitrust enforcers have identified and assessed whether an agreement or business practice affecting workers may violate the antitrust laws.  The 2025 Guidelines were voted out at the FTC on a split 3-2 vote along party lines, with a brief but scathing dissenting statement from the Republican commissioners (including incoming FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson) that raises serious doubts as to how well the Guidelines reflect the approach the agencies will take during the next four years.  On the eve of the incoming Trump Administration, the 2025 Guidelines replaced the previous joint DOJ and FTC antitrust guidelines regarding employment practices that were issued in 2016, “Antitrust Guidance for Human Resource Professionals” (the “2016 Guidelines”), during the tail-end of the Obama Administration.

Participants of the GICLI Annual Meeting share valuable experiences and practical strategies for handling government investigations and related civil litigation at collegial roundtable and panel discussions. An open, knowledge-sharing forum is encourages throughout two days of breakfast sessions, workshops and casual, relationship-building events.

Alexis will moderate a panel called "Merger Review Retrospective," which will review high-profile mergers and key developments in merger control in 2019.

Join us for this year’s Health Care Ounce of Prevention Seminar (HOOPS), a webinar series where our experienced practitioners will provide insight into a number of exciting topics. This year’s seminar will focus on topics such as Remote Health Care and Telemedicine, Mental Health Parity, Health Care Litigation, and Health Care Trends for 2022. 

On July 13, President Biden signed the sweeping Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, which contained 72 directives to multiple federal agencies aimed at establishing a “whole-of-government” effort to promote competition across broad swaths of the American economy. Many recommendations within that Executive Order called upon the FTC to issue new rules relating to consumer protection, privacy, and competition issues. Even before the Executive Order, several Commissioners and other commentators were calling upon the FTC to exercise its rarely-used independent rulemaking authority to issue new rules to address a broad range of issues. 

In this episode, hosts Payal Nanavati and Joe Records talk to Katy Raffensperger, Todd Rosenberg, and Alexis Gilman about expectations for health care transactions in 2022. The discussion captures how transactions involving health care companies may respond to legal, economic, and market circumstances, including lasting care delivery changes spurred by the COVID pandemic, antitrust scrutiny by federal regulators, inflation, and rising interest rates.