Covington's Antitrust Practice recently welcomed five highly regarded and seasoned antitrust litigators. John Nields handles high-profile antitrust, commercial, and white-collar litigation matters and focuses in particular on companies in the life sciences sector. Alan Wiseman has extensive trial and litigation experience in a broad array of antitrust and commercial matters. Andrew Lazerow has extensive experience representing clients in numerous industries in antitrust class actions, securities fraud class actions, and other complex commercial disputes. Jason Raofield concentrates on antitrust and commercial litigation with a particular focus on the pharmaceutical sector, and Tom Isaacson focuses on a wide range of civil litigation and antitrust matters, with a particular emphasis on antitrust class action matters.
The Antitrust Practice, chaired by two recent heads of the Antitrust Division, Tom Barnett and Deborah Garza, is uniquely positioned to assist its clients through unparalleled experience and talent.
Before joining Covington, Tom Barnett served as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division from 2005-2008. Prior to that he served in the Division as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Enforcement from 2004-2005. During his tenure, Mr. Barnett was involved in some of the largest and most complicated criminal matters in the Division’s history, including investigations and prosecutions that involved coordination with multiple competition authorities in other jurisdictions.
Deborah Garza has been involved in some of the largest antitrust matters in recent history, including the merger of Exxon and Mobil, the U.S. Government’s suit against Microsoft, and the USFL suit against the NFL. Ms. Garza was appointed by President Bush to Chair the Antitrust Modernization Commission in 2004. She was appointed Acting Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division, after serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Regulatory Affairs from 2007-2008.
In addition to Mr. Barnett and Ms. Garza, the firm’s antitrust and consumer law attorneys include other alumni of the DOJ, the FTC, and the Office of the Solicitor General, including John Graubert, former Deputy General Counsel of the FTC. Other firm lawyers have written important treatises on different aspects of antitrust law, including international antitrust and the Robinson-Patman Act.
Covington recently has expanded its European competition practice with the addition of three new partners in Brussels, Peter Camesasca, Damien Geradin, and Lars Kjølbye. Dr. Camesasca has experience advising clients on all major aspects of EU and national competition law and has acted before the European Commission, the European courts, the German Bundeskartellamt, the UK Office of Fair Trading, the Belgian Competition Council and various national courts. Mr. Geradin focuses on the interface between competition and intellectual property, as well as the regulation of network industries. He advises businesses, governments and regulatory agencies on issues affecting a variety of industries, including telecommunications, media, energy and transport. Mr. Kjølbye brings more than ten years experience at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition (DG Comp), including serving as head of the energy and environment antitrust unit. The firm now has 15 competition lawyers in Brussels.
The firm represents clients before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and has handled many complex civil and criminal antitrust and consumer law matters, including major treble-damage actions, nationwide class actions, consolidated multidistrict litigation, internal investigations, and short-fuse preliminary injunction proceedings. We have extensive experience handling state law antitrust, consumer protection and unfair competition claims, matters involving regulated industries, and issues arising from emerging antitrust specialties such as health care, intellectual property, and Internet matters. The firm also has an active European Community competition law practice, involving both American and European counsel, and we have a very substantial international trade practice that is separately profiled within this site.
The firm’s antitrust and consumer law practice benefits from the industry-specific experience of our lawyers involved in other areas of practice, including pharmaceuticals, communications, energy, financial services, life sciences, sports, and transportation. This experience allows our antitrust and consumer protection counsel to bring a sophisticated understanding of specific economic forces at play in this particular industry and to develop threshold defenses based on federal or state regulation. The firm also has considerable experience in developing and presenting expert witness testimony on difficult economic, accounting, and marketing issues that are often of fundamental importance in resolving antitrust and consumer law disputes. Our decades of experience advising on competitor collaborations and the breadth of our experience in related e-commerce issues (corporate, intellectual property privacy, and contract) enable us to provide comprehensive service to such e-commerce ventures.
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