Antitrust Compliance Policy

July 9, 2020

Invited to Your First Trade Association Meeting? Here Are Important Antitrust Tips

So you have been invited to your first trade association meeting. Sounds like fun, right? You get a chance to mix and mingle with others in your industry, maybe swap notes with your counterparts at competitors who face the same pressures you do. What could go wrong?

A lot, from an antitrust perspective. While trade associations can provide tremendous benefits to members, by definition, they are meetings among competitors. Communication with competitors can lead to “agreements,” whether explicit handshakes or implicit winks and nods. And some of those agreements, like most related to competitive pricing, are automatically illegal and subject to severe penalties for both you and the company. Here, antitrust law follows Adam Smith’s admonition that

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

So even if you remember your company’s training from when you joined years ago and know enough to spell “antitrust” without a hyphen, you still need to remember these tips.

Learn from others in your company

You might not be the first in your company to attend an association meeting. Contact your lawyer or boss to see if your company has rules or other guidance for attending them. Follow that guidance. Some companies even require such reporting before attending. Others in your company might know this particular association and have some suggestions on how to make your attendance both safe and productive for you and your company.

Antitrust policy?

If you need to vet the association, start by asking to see its antitrust policy. All associations of competitors should have one and should be willing and able to share it with you quickly. Most post it online. The policy should acknowledge the necessity to follow all applicable antitrust laws and briefly describe how the association does just that. Frankly, the details are not as important as the fact that the association has one and can quickly provide it. An association executive who responds to your request with “Anti what?” should set off alarm bells.

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April 21, 2020

My Company Is Under Investigation: Do I Need Separate Counsel?

by Bona Law PC

Author: Jon Cieslak

When a law enforcement or regulatory agency—such as the Department of Justice (DOJ) or the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—investigates potentially illegal business conduct, it may not be targeting just the company under investigation. Oftentimes, authorities are also targeting the company’s employees who engaged in the illegal conduct, and corporate officers and other employees are frequently indicted alongside their employers in antitrust and other cases. See, e.g., United States v. Hsiung, 778 F.3d 738 (9th Cir. 2014). Indeed, in 2015, U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates issued the so-called “Yates Memo” that reaffirmed DOJ’s commitment to seek “accountability from the individuals who perpetrated the wrongdoing.”

While the company typically hires outside counsel with experience defending the potential claims, one area that is sometimes overlooked is whether the employees involved in the investigation need their own lawyers. Employees may think the company’s lawyer represents them as well, but that is rarely the case and employees should be quickly disabused of the notion. Both the Supreme Court in Upjohn v. United States, 449 U.S. 383 (1981), and legal ethics rules compel corporate lawyers to clarify when they do not represent individual employees when conducting internal investigations. See, e.g., Model Rules of Prof’l Conduct R. 1.13(f).

So when does an employee need her own lawyer?

While there is no bright-line rule, considering some key questions can help you make the right decision.

First, is the employee a target of the investigation, or merely a witness? During an investigation, investigators will talk to many potential witnesses in addition to the individuals whom they suspect of illegal conduct. When confident that investigators believe an employee is only a witness to the potentially illegal conduct, the need for separate counsel is significantly reduced.

Second, does the employee face personal consequences as a result of her conduct? Consequences may include criminal penalties such as imprisonment or fines, suspension or loss of professional licenses, personal liability for civil damages awards, or employment consequences such as demotion or termination. While even a small chance of criminal penalties merits separate counsel, as the likelihood of any of these consequences grows, so too does the importance for an employee to have her own lawyer. Keep in mind, too, that individuals involved in some illegal conduct—such as an antitrust conspiracy—can be jointly and severally liable for all the harm caused by the conspiracy, so could face an enormous civil damages award even if their role was minimal. See Texas Industries, Inc. v. Radcliff Materials, Inc., 451 U.S. 630, 646 (1981).

Third, was the investigation initiated by a law enforcement or regulatory agency, or is it purely an internal investigation by the company itself? In general, separate counsel is less important in internal investigations. On the other hand, when the government is investigating, separate counsel can benefit both the employee and the company. Not only will the employee’s interests be better protected, separate counsel will also help insulate the company’s lawyers from potential disqualification and allegations of obstruction. Separate counsel is particularly important when an employee will be interviewed directly by law enforcement agents, who are more likely to trust a witness’s independent attorney.

Fourth, and most importantly, does the employee have any actual or potential conflicts of interest with the company and, if so, how severe are they? When both the company and the employee are targets of a government investigation, there will almost always be at least a potential conflict between them. A company usually has substantial incentives to cooperate with a government investigation, such as the potential for amnesty under the DOJ’s Leniency Program and credit for cooperating under the Sentencing Guidelines. To fully cooperate, however, the Yates Memo requires companies to “completely disclose . . . all relevant facts about individual misconduct.” Meanwhile, an employee involved in the conduct may want to seek immunity in exchange for testifying against the company or other individuals. Even less severe conflicts, however, can warrant separate counsel. If an employee disagrees with the company’s view of the facts or feels pressure to testify in a certain way, separate counsel may be needed to protect the employee’s interests.

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January 7, 2020

Your Company Isn’t Based in Silicon Valley: Why Should You Care About the Antitrust “Techlash”?

by Bona Law PC

Author: Steven Cernak

Companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and more have faced an increasing number of antitrust investigations and challenges (globally), both private and government, in recent years. In the U.S., current Presidential candidates are lining up to propose changes to antitrust laws and advocate for enforcement focused on these same tech companies. While they might not be explicit targets in as many actions, other U.S. companies outside Silicon Valley could be swallowed up in this techlash and so need to be prepared.

Techlash not New and Not Just American

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November 11, 2019

Six key attributes of an effective antitrust compliance program

by Bona Law PC

Author: Aaron Gott

If you haven’t been told you need a strong antitrust compliance program, then you probably haven’t spent much time with an antitrust lawyer. But it’s true: a strong antitrust compliance program will benefit your company in myriad ways.

The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division recently announced it will consider an effective antitrust compliance program as a factor in deciding whether to charge a company with a criminal antitrust violation. An antitrust compliance program can also help prevent your company from violating the antitrust laws in the first place and, hopefully, avoid an antitrust blizzard. But if it doesn’t, it can still give you a leg up in the race for leniency by ensuring prompt detection and internal reporting, earn the company points for sentencing reductions, and reduce the amount it pays in fines.

The key here, though, is that it must be an effective antitrust compliance program. Effective doesn’t mean perfect—after all, DOJ wouldn’t be making a charging decision if a perfect program were in place—but it does mean that it should be well-designed, applied in good faith, and it should actually work.

In practice, that means your antitrust compliance program should:

Identify, assess, and define the likely antitrust risks in the company’s line of business

The first step in any risk management process is, of course, to determine and assess those risks. Your antitrust lawyer should look closely at all aspects of your operations:

The jurisdictions in which you operate
Your industry sectors and the markets in which you compete
Competition, concentration, and barriers to entry in those markets
Your regulatory landscape
Your existing and potential customers and business partners
Your supply and distribution chains
Your business transactions
The extent to which you use third parties in your business
Your involvement in trade associations and joint ventures
Your culture and climate
Your past antitrust issues

As part of this process, the company should identify leaders most knowledgeable about these various aspects of the business and have them take the time to thoroughly educate antitrust counsel.

Be designed to detect and manage those risks

It should go without saying that your compliance program won’t be effective unless it is tailored to manage the antitrust risks the company is most likely to face. There is no effective off-the-shelf antitrust compliance program.

Company leadership should be consulted and involved in the crafting of your antitrust compliance program. You should consider the company’s past successes and failures in other areas of compliance, reporting, and risk management, and work directly with your antitrust lawyer to implement processes and techniques that proved successful in other contexts.

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July 14, 2019

Antitrust News: The Department of Justice Wants You to Have a Strong Antitrust Compliance Policy

by Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

You might hear from an antitrust attorney that it is important to have a strong antitrust compliance policy. And you may think to yourself, yes, I suppose it is. Then you go about your over-packed day, periodically seeing from other professionals that whatever their specialty is, you need to call them right away to have them help you too.

And that isn’t a surprise because each professional, each specialist in something, and, really, each person with any experience of any sort sees life through their own unique lens. We wrote about this in the context of trade associations.

The truth is we are all bombarded with marketing and emails and social media posts and problems in our lives and our world that are “urgent” or “important.”

So when I tell you that your company should have a strong antitrust compliance policy, no matter what its size, you may appreciate that advice, but recognize that (1) I see life through the lens of antitrust and competition law (among other lenses); and (2) Bona Law prepares antitrust compliance policies, so I am biased. And both of those are true. Whenever you evaluate what anyone says, you should do so understanding their perspective, as bias isn’t necessarily conscious or even negative—it often just is part of perspective and experience.

This is a long introduction to tell you that when it comes to antitrust compliance policies, you don’t just have to listen to me or the many other attorneys that advocate for them:

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice has now reversed its position and will give companies with robust compliance programs credit when considering charges.

The purpose of the policy change, of course, is to encourage companies to adopt and (just as importantly) follow strong antitrust compliance programs. If that occurs, the amount of criminal antitrust conduct should decrease. Of course, there may be an inverse relationship between the companies that would enact and follow an antitrust compliance program and those that would criminally violate the antitrust laws. But, still, it will probably help overall. And it should help to keep otherwise law-abiding companies from getting pulled into, for example, an industry-wide price-fixing cartel. If that happens, they will likely experience what we like to call an antitrust blizzard.

In a speech at New York University School of Law, Makan Delrahim said that in evaluating a policy for charging decisions, DOJ prosecutors would consider whether the program is well-designed, if the company applies it in good faith, and if the program actually works. So, as you can see, this is one of those policies that will evolve as they try it on a case-by-case basis.

The Department of Justice also released details on how it would evaluate antitrust compliance policies: US Department of Justice Antitrust Division: Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs in Criminal Antitrust Investigations.

We will write more about the specifics of a strong corporate compliance program in future articles.

In the meantime, you can read an article by Luis Blanquez about antitrust compliance policies in the US and Europe.

As you might know, the DOJ already has a leniency program, which you can learn more about here. DOJ will sometimes grant leniency to companies and people that report antitrust cartel activity and then cooperate with the DOJ investigation. DOJ antitrust attorneys, experts in competition themselves, incorporated some competition into their leniency program.

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June 14, 2019

Why is Antitrust Compliance Counseling and Training So Important?

by Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

If, like me, you have ever spoken to someone that faces criminal indictment by a federal grand jury following a Justice Department antitrust investigation, you know why antitrust compliance counseling and training is a big deal—you don’t need reasons; hearing the crackle of the voice is enough to understand.

You might think that an antitrust investigation or lawsuit may not happen to you or your company. Perhaps you think that your company is too small or that since you don’t sit in smoke-filled rooms with many of your competitors laughing about your customers—or whatever image from books or movies is in your head, antitrust isn’t something you need to worry about.

You might be wrong. Are the chances great that you will be prosecuted or sued under the antitrust laws? Since you are reading a blog about antitrust, they are greater than average, but even still, the odds are relatively low.

But even if the likelihood of an adverse antitrust event is low, the consequences may be so extreme that it is something you should think about. You don’t anticipate that your house is going to burn down, but you—hopefully—take some precautions and probably have some sort of fire protection as part of your homeowner’s insurance.

With antitrust, a little knowledge can go a long way.

If you have an antitrust issue, it is not likely to be a small issue. Indeed, it may start with a government investigation, but could progress into dozens of antitrust class actions against your company.

As you might know, there is a cottage industry of plaintiff attorneys that read SEC filings and watch for government antitrust investigations. When they see something that raises the possibility of an antitrust violation, they pounce. Attorneys all over the country file lawsuits in their home jurisdictions against the target company—which could be your company if you aren’t careful. I go into more detail about this “antitrust blizzard” here.

Antitrust issues can arise for big and small companies and even individuals—like real-estate investors. If you don’t think your company is susceptible to antitrust liability or indictment, I’d like you to read one of my early blog posts that explains how easily a per se antitrust violation can happen.

The Federal Trade Commission even went after an association of music teachers for potentially violating the antitrust laws.

What is tough about antitrust is that the laws are not always intuitive; it isn’t like a law that says “don’t steal.” In fact, in one instance, the antitrust laws encourage you to try to steal.

Sometimes the law isn’t even altogether clear. Of course, you are unlikely to face criminal indictment over complicated questions of whether a bundle of products sold by a company with market power violates the antitrust laws. Or whether your vertical pricing arrangements went beyond Colgate policy protections. But you could face criminal antitrust penalties for allocating markets and customers and that isn’t obvious to all sales people.

The bottom line is that if you run or help to manage a company—and especially if your company has a sales team—you need some knowledge of the antitrust laws. At the very least, you should understand what to train your team members to avoid. Antitrust training can be invaluable.

You might also enjoy our article on Antitrust Compliance Programs in the US and European Union.

Antitrust compliance training and programs are even more important now that the US Department of Justice has announced that they will take these programs into account in their charging decisions.

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May 26, 2019

Antitrust Compliance Programs in the US and the European Union

by Bona Law PC

Author: Luis Blanquez

Luis Blanquez is a European Competition Attorney that works with Bona Law.

WHAT IS AN ANTITRUST COMPLIANCE PROGRAM?

An antitrust compliance program is an internal business policy designed by a company to educate directors and employees to avoid risks of anticompetitive conduct.

Companies that conspire with their competitors to fix prices, share markets, allocate customers, production or output limitation; have historically faced severe fines from antitrust enforcement all over the world.

Companies articulating such programs are in the best position to detect and report the existence of unlawful anticompetitive activities, and if necessary, be the first ones to secure corporate leniency from antitrust authorities. This allows them to avoid substantial fines, and in some jurisdictions, such as the US and the UK, even criminal charges.

But not every program ensures compliance. A successful compliance program must alert and educate sales force; issue-spot risks; encourage reporting of anticompetitive issues, and deter risky conduct.

Over the years, antitrust authorities all over the world have published some general guidance creating and managing compliance programs. Even though there are differences between jurisdictions, all of them seem to have the following anchor points in common:

No “one size fits all” model: You must tailor your compliance program.

Effective compliance programs require companies to tailor their internal policies according to their particular situation.

A generic out-of-the-box compliance program is not likely to be effective. It is more important that the company conducts an assessment of the particular risk areas involved in its day-to-day business activities, with a specific focus on the structure and previous history of the industry.

Interaction of sales people with other competitors, with close attention to trade association meetings, is also an important point to consider. To illustrate, employees with access to pricing information and business plans are more likely to meet their counterparts from other companies in trade association reunions or industry events.

Development of training programs to educate directors and employees.

A company should ensure antitrust compliance training for all executives, managers and employees, especially those with sales and pricing responsibilities.

Genuinely effective compliance requires that companies apply the antitrust policy and training program to their entire organizational structure, preferably in writing. It may take the form of a manual and must be plainly worded in all the working languages of the company, so everyone understands it. The antitrust policy must contain a general description of antitrust law and its purpose, explaining the way the company enforces it, along with highlights of the potential costs of non-compliance.

An effective way to implement an antitrust policy is through a list of “Don’ts”, including illegal conduct such as price-fixing agreements, the exchange of future pricing information, or allocation of production quotas, among other conduct.

You might complement the forbidden conduct with a list of “Red Flags” to identify situations in which antitrust risks may arise (i.e. sales people attending trade associations or industry events).

You might also add a list of “Do’s” because employees are often more receptive to what they can do, rather than what they cannot do.

Finally, companies and their employees should document their antitrust compliance training in writing. This assures that employees take compliance efforts seriously and that antitrust enforcers understand that the company does so too.

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Learn from others in your company

Antitrust policy?

So when does an employee need her own lawyer?

Techlash not New and Not Just American

Identify, assess, and define the likely antitrust risks in the company’s line of business

Be designed to detect and manage those risks

WHAT IS AN ANTITRUST COMPLIANCE PROGRAM?

No “one size fits all” model: You must tailor your compliance program.

Development of training programs to educate directors and employees.