Kenneth Schwartz is a partner with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and is based in the firm’s New York office. He represents clients in antitrust transactional and advisory matters. He has worked in a diverse range of industries, including agriculture, airlines, chemicals, consumer products, defense and government contracting, energy, entertainment, financial services, health care, insurance, media, medical devices, natural resources, private equity, pharmaceuticals, retail and telecommunications. Mr. Schwartz regularly appears before the antitrust agencies in a variety of investigational contexts. In the area of general antitrust counseling, Mr. Schwartz advises clients on a variety of antitrust matters, including joint ventures, competitor collaborations, unilateral conduct, and pricing and distribution issues. He also frequently works with Skadden’s Financial Institutions Group on antitrust issues that arise in insurance M&A and regulatory matters. Mr. Schwartz has been repeatedly selected for inclusion in Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business and has been named to The Best Lawyers in America. He is a regular columnist for the New York Law Journal. In 2012, he won the Institute of Competition Law’s Antitrust Academic Article Readers Award for “‘Tally Ho!’: UPP and the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines,” co-authored with James Keyte.
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The Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice released a draft of proposed new merger guidelines Wednesday, 18 months after FTC Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter announced plans to "modernize" the agencies’ approach to merger (...)
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a draft of proposed new merger guidelines today, 18 months after FTC Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter announced plans to “modernize” the agencies’ approach to (...)
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On June 27, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) (collectively, the Agencies) jointly released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) proposing sweeping changes to the premerger filings required under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act. According to the (...)
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On January 23, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced revised notification thresholds under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 (HSR Act). If a proposed merger, acquisition of stock, assets or unincorporated interests, or other business combination meets (...)
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Key Points The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a Policy Statement that dramatically broadens its approach to enforcement of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits “unfair methods of competition.” The FTC is taking the position that Congress created the Commission to address (...)
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On Nov. 10, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) defined how it intends to determine whether particular conduct constitutes an unfair method of competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act. FTC, Policy Statement Regarding the Scope of Unfair Methods of Competition Under Section 5 of the (...)
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On July 7, 2022, a federal jury in Denver acquitted five executives who faced criminal charges for conspiring to fix prices in the chicken industry. The not-guilty verdict, which acquitted current and former executives of top chicken producers Pilgrim’s Pride and Claxton Poultry Farms, (...)
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On February 17th, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced an initiative to protect supply chains from anticompetitive behavior amid global disruptions and persistent inflation. The initiative is yet another example of the Biden Administration’s aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement (...)
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On January 24, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the revised thresholds for determining whether companies are required to notify federal antitrust authorities about a transaction under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended (HSR Act). If a (...)
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On Jan. 18, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division announced a joint public inquiry related to the federal merger guidelines, with the goal of “strengthening enforcement against illegal mergers.” Members of the public are encouraged to (...)
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Reform of traditional antitrust enforcement and competition law globally has been an on-going discussion amongst enforcers, politicians, advisors, economic experts, and academics. While conversations pertaining to antitrust reforms have been widely centered around resolving the issues (...)
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On Sept. 3, the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) released the Merger Remedies Manual (the manual), which provides guidance on how the agency currently intends to approach the structure and implementation of remedies in merger cases. See Antitrust Div., U. S. Department of (...)
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Following their January publication of Draft Vertical Merger Guidelines (draft guidelines) for public comment, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) (collectively, the agencies) issued final Vertical Merger Guidelines (Guidelines) on June 30, 2020. This marks (...)
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On June 25, 2020, Congress approved the renewal and permanent extension of the Antitrust Criminal Penalty Enhancement and Reform Act (ACPERA or “the Act”), which limits the civil damages exposure of companies that cooperate with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in selfreporting their own (...)
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DOJ Merger Enforcement Arbitration: A Sign of Things To Come?* On March 2020, the Antitrust Division Of the Department Of Justice successfully secured the divestiture by Novelis of Aleris Corporation’s North American aluminum production facilities in U.S. v. Novelis et al. with an unorthodox (...)
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On April 12, the Federal Trade Commission held a hearing to debate the extent to which the FTC should use retrospective reviews to strengthen merger enforcement. This was the latest in the series of hearings on Competition and Consumer Privacy in the 21st Century. The hearing included remarks (...)
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The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Bureau of Competition has established a task force dedicated to monitoring competition in U.S. technology markets and taking enforcement actions as warranted. While the remit of the task force largely overlaps with the FTC’s existing enforcement activities, (...)
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In a continuation of recent Department of Justice (DOJ) successes challenging mergers, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia recently enjoined two more proposed mergers brought and litigated under the Obama administration. Aetna’s $37 billion proposed acquisition of Humana was (...)
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On April 4, 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ) led a complaint against activist investor ValueAct Capital in California federal court, requesting a $19 million fine for violations of the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act’s notifcation provisions . The DOJ’s complaint (...)
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This article has been nominated for the 2016 Antitrust Writing Awards. Click here to learn more about the Antitrust Writing Awards. On September 24, 2015, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio denied the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) bid to enjoin Steris Corporation (...)
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On November 7, 2014, the United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ) announced a $5 million agreement to settle charges that Flakeboard and SierraPine had engaged in unlawful pre-merger coordination . The DOJ’s complaint alleged that the parties’ conduct constituted both a (...)
