Antitrust Risk Hiding in Plain Sight: A Practical Guide to Everyday Compliance

Most antitrust exposure doesn’t originate in boardrooms or formal agreements. It originates in the field: at trade association meetings, in text threads between former colleagues who now work for competing companies, in casual conversations at industry events, and in the internal emails, Teams messages, and presentations that document how a company talks about competition. These routine interactions and communications are where enforcement agencies and plaintiffs’ lawyers find their best evidence, and they’re often invisible to the legal department until a subpoena arrives.

This session will give in-house counsel an industry agnostic practical framework for identifying and managing the antitrust risks embedded in everyday business activity. The program will cover the core antitrust principles that in-house counsel need as context and then turn to the practical settings where risk arises: competitor interactions at trade associations and industry events, benchmarking and data exchanges, and joint ventures and other competitor collaborations.

A significant portion of the session will focus on the documentary side of antitrust risk -- how internal communications become the centerpiece of investigations and litigation, and what problematic documents actually look like in practice. The program will walk through examples of the kinds of emails, text messages, and internal communications that routinely create problems in antitrust matters, with discussion of why each is problematic and how the risk could have been avoided.

The session will close with a discussion of what distinguishes antitrust compliance programs that actually change employee behavior from those that exist only on paper, and a short set of near-term steps that any legal department can take to begin evaluating its antitrust exposure.

All registration links are located in our weekly email.

Questions: Kathleen Smits at charlotteAED@accglobal.com