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Covington for decades has been a preeminent transactional antitrust advisor, regularly providing US antitrust and EU competition law advice to corporations around the world in connection with their mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and other strategic transactions in virtually every industry. We represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several Fortune 50 clients in helping to shape the original Hart-Scott-Rodino premerger reporting program, and we represented the recipients of the first Second Request ever issued by the Federal Trade Commission. We also have been home to seven former heads of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and two Chairmen of the ABA Antitrust Law Section – a unique distinction among law firms actively practicing in the M&A Antitrust area.
Covington has been directly involved in many of the country’s landmark transactional antitrust decisions, from the “Cellophane” case involving market definition and Dupont/Conoco merger (at the time the largest in history) of years past to the Exxon/Mobil merger (the most extensive investigation of a merger in the history of the FTC), in which we successfully represented Exxon. Aided by a state-of-the-art database of foreign merger filing information and experience, our 60+ strong antitrust group located throughout our five US and European offices has successfully represented hundreds of domestic and foreign clients in practically addressing potential antitrust filing requirements and efficiently clearing larger cross-border transactions with antitrust authorities in the US, EU, European Member States, and numerous other jurisdictions around the world. Our thriving offices in Brussels and London routinely handle a variety of European transactions for clients around the world. A few examples of transactions handled by Covington’s antitrust team that illustrate the complex challenges successfully addressed by our lawyers as well as the overall depth and global breadth of our transactional antitrust practice are listed below.
Representative Matters
- The sale of mining operations by an RTZ plc subsidiary in the US to Engelhard Corporation, which survived a Justice Department merger-to-monopoly challenge and three-week bench trial.
- Representation of the purchaser in the largest hospital system acquisition in history involving direct competitors in a primary service area.
- The hostile tender offer by France’s Imerys for English China Clays plc on the London Stock Exchange, where Justice Department clearance was obtained within the stringent time frames imposed by the LSE despite the fact that the transaction effectively unwound an earlier Justice Department divestiture decree.
- Dupont’s historic nylon-acrylics swap transaction with the UK’s Imperial Chemical Industries by which the inventor of nylon re-acquired the business from its original licensee.
- Union Pacific Corporation’s successful acquisition of Southern Pacific Rail Corporation – the largest railroad merger in history.
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