Matt Evola is an associate at McDermott Will & Emery. His practice focuses on antitrust, regulatory and litigation matters. He has additional experience in consumer protection, government investigations, and white collar defense. During law school, Matt Evola was highly involved in pro bono initiatives, working with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless and DC Law Students in Court. He also acted as senior articles editor for the American Criminal Law Review (ACLR), actively contributing to the publication’s online blog Mens Rea, and as a legal extern to Judge James E. Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia.
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The NSI Act replaces the system of discretionary public interest intervention in mergers by the UK government under the UK Enterprise Act and creates a new mandatory notification system operated by the Investment Security Unit (ISU), part of the UK Department for Business, Energy and (...)
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On December 21, 2021, the CMA updated its guidance on interim measures in merger investigations and the initial enforcement order template. Interim measures take three forms, which depend on the stage of the investigation and whether they are imposed on the merging parties or agreed between (...)
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IAG, owner of leading airlines in Ireland, Spain and the UK, sought to acquire Air Europa from Globalia and provided notification of the transaction to the Commission in May 2021. IAG, owner of Iberia and Vueling, is the largest airline in Spain and Air Europa is the third-largest airline in (...)
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On December 14, 2021, the Commission conditionally cleared in Phase I Veolia’s acquisition of Suez. The Commission deemed Veolia’s comprehensive commitments sufficient to assuage the Commission’s competition concerns, without the need for a Phase 2 investigation. The Commission found that (...)
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In October 2021, the European Commission imposed interim measures on Illumina and GRAIL to restore and maintain competition between the entities following Illumina’s decision to close its acquisition of GRAIL prior to the Commission completing its review of the transaction and in breach of the (...)
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On October 25, 2021, the FTC announced a return to the practice of including prior approval provisions in consent decrees for allegedly anticompetitive mergers. This means that in addition to divesting a business, the FTC is requiring companies to obtain FTC prior approval before purchasing (...)
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In May 2020, Facebook purchased Giphy, the largest provider of GIFs (a format for image files that supports both animated and static images). Giphy operates an online database and search engine that primarily allows users to search and share GIFs and can be used indirectly on third-party apps, (...)
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The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently extracted a $3.5 million civil penalty from two companies involved in a gas station merger. The FTC asserts the companies violated their settlement agreement with the government, which required the divestment of 10 gas stations within 120 days (...)
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FTC AND DOJ DRAFT VERTICAL MERGER GUIDELINES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL TRANSPARENCY TO AGENCY PRACTICE* For the first time since the Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ) published non-horizontal merger guidelines in 1984, the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued updated Vertical (...)
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“[T]here is no need to opine on the proper legal standards for evaluating vertical mergers because, on appeal, neither party challenges the legal standards the district court applied.” —U.S. Circuit Judge Judith W. Rogers, United States v. AT&T Inc. Antitrust practitioners and business (...)
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THE LATEST: DOJ Announces New Model Timing Agreement for Merger Investigations* Consistent with Assistant Attorney General Delrahim’s speech on September 25, 2018, the DOJ released a new Model Timing Agreement which sets out that it will require fewer custodians, take fewer depositions, and (...)
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Indirect purchaser plaintiffs’ motion for class certification in a lithium ion battery suit was denied for failing to show concrete evidence linking increased input costs to increased end-product prices; theoretical inference is not enough. What happened: The US District Court for the (...)
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What Happened: Wading into the merging streams of antitrust and patents, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld dismissal of an antitrust suit where a jury verdict in a parallel case found no patent infringement. Cascades Computer Innovation, LLC v. RPX Corp. and Samsung (...)
