Antitrust Compliance and Audit

Our services include:

• Designing compliance programs
• Delivering individually tailored and interactive training
• Conducting large scale compliance audits
• Providing dawn-raid guidance, documentation, and support
• Specific advice and guidance on individual issues

Compliance Training

We pride ourselves on the quality of our highly interactive compliance training. We work with our clients to develop case-study based, tailor-made training, using real-life examples as our source material. The training can then be delivered either by our multilingual team or by the client’s in-house team.

We also have extensive pre-existing materials covering a range of frequently occurring issues such as:

• Competitor collaborations
• Pre-merger planning and document generation
• Price signaling and other information exchanges
• A range of IP/antitrust issues

We see training and updates as very much part of the process of building and maintaining client relationships and are generally prepared to invest in developing and delivering these services as part of our wider advisor-client relationship.

Compliance Programs

We have developed a range of bespoke compliance programs for organizations ranging from multinationals to trade associations and smaller companies, and issue-specific guidance on topics such as information exchange and pre-merger planning.

Dawn Raid Support

We have extensive know-how in relation to the conduct of dawn raids and the powers not only of the European Commission but also of national competition agencies across Europe. We have distilled that knowledge into clear and concise dawn raid guidance and checklists and can, if required, provide extensive training, up to and including the carrying out of “mock raids” where appropriate.

Audits

Audits are an important tool, particularly where potential concerns have been identified. An audit will often be a multi-step process. The preliminary stage is typically an initial discussion with representatives from the business units concerned to obtain sufficient understanding of the products/services sold, the routes to market and other relevant market conditions. These discussions are also a useful means of ensuring local management buy-in. Thereafter, the usual process is as follows:

1. The client provides us with a master list (for each jurisdiction) of the employees that have contact with competitors or the authority to set prices. That typically includes managing directors, sales directors, marketing directors, and any other employee that has attended trade associations over the last two years.
2. Together with the client, we select employee email accounts to review based on function, volume of email to be reviewed and other factors. Together, we also identify categories of key documents to be reviewed, such as trade association files, strategic plans and other senior management presentations.
3. We develop, in consultation with the client, a list of search terms to filter email and other electronic documents.
4. Electronic documents are collected and filtered in collaboration with an external vendor. The collection, filtering and subsequent review are organized so as to be fully compliant with data protection laws.
5. We review documents to identify potential antitrust compliance issues.
6. We conduct in-person interviews with key personnel on a one-to-one basis.
7. We provide interactive antitrust training using hypothetical cases based on information gathered during the document review and interviews.
8. We synthesize the key documents and interviews in a written report with findings and recommendations mitigating antitrust risk. The report is privileged and confidential.

Fees

We can and do offer most of our compliance products on the basis of a flat fee agreement, including larger and more complex products such as audits. In this way, we ensure predictability for our clients and help them to avoid surprises. For audits, the fee itself depends on the number of sites, the number of employees to be interviewed and the amount of data to be reviewed.