Antitrust Mergers & Acquisitions | Private Antitrust Litigation | Cartels & Government Investigations | Antitrust Compliance & Counseling

Antitrust Mergers & Acquisitions

Strong Track Record. Clients turn to Shearman & Sterling for their most important transactions because we have a superb track record of guiding our clients safely through the complex thicket of pre-merger filing requirements of nearly 100 countries with competition laws.

We regularly secure clearance in the US, the EU, and worldwide for complex cross-border mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures. We practice before major antitrust enforcers around the world, including the US Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, various state attorneys general, the European Commission, the German Federal Cartel Office, the French Competition Authority, the UK Competition Commission and the UK Office of Fair Trading. We have represented hundreds of clients in high-profile M&A transactions before these authorities, most on a repeated basis. We also have successfully opposed mergers on our clients’ behalf. In either case, we engage regulators proactively to achieve the best results for clients.

We work closely with the transactional lawyers in our firm to anticipate and address antitrust concerns in the context of M&A transactions, joint ventures, licensing and distribution agreements, and other types of transactions.

Illustrative Recent Experience

Mergers & Acquisitions Representations:

• NASDAQ OMX in its bid, along with IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), for NYSE Euronext in a deal valued at $11.3 billion
• Synthes, Inc. in its pending $21.3 billion acquisition by Johnson & Johnson
• Anglo American in its $1.08 billion sale of Moly-Cop and AltaSteel to OneSteel Limited
• Gambro in its $2.62 billion sale of CaridianBCT to Terumo Corporation
• American Sugar Holdings in its agreement to acquire Tate & Lyle's European sugars refining business (and certain related businesses) for $319 million
• Psychiatric Solutions in its $3.1 billion sale to United Health Services
• Sybase in its $5.8 billion sale to SAP
• Cadbury in the US merger aspects of its $19.4 billion acquisition by Kraft
• Republic Services in its $6.07 billion merger with Allied Waste Industries
• The Intercontinental Exchange in its acquisition of The Clearing Corporation and formation of the ICE Trust central clearing facility for credit default swaps
• Ciba AG in its $5.3 billion acquisition by BASF before the FTC
• Merrill Lynch in its $50 billion acquisition by Bank of America
• The Thomson Corporation in the antitrust aspects of its $17.2 billion merger with Reuters before the US Department of Justice and coordinating the antitrust defense of the transaction worldwide

View additional antitrust mergers and acquisitions experience