Insights

New York – January 25, 2022: Crowell & Moring LLP is pleased to announce that Rosa M. Morales, counsel in the firm’s Antitrust & Competition Group, is the inaugural recipient of the Hollis Salzman Leadership Fellowship, established by the Antitrust Law Section of the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) in memory of Hollis Salzman (1965-2020), a pre-eminent antitrust attorney and the Section’s longtime member and former leader. The Fellowship is designed to support and promote women antitrust lawyers who are in the mid-stage of their careers and seeking to move to the next level.

On April 23, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC” or “the Agency”) voted 3-2 along partisan lines in a special public meeting to adopt the “Non-Compete Clause Rule” (the “Final Rule”), which will prohibit most employee non-competes with retroactive effect, except existing non-compete provisions of “senior executives.”  The Final Rule will also ban future non-compete agreements, including for senior executives, with limited exceptions.  The rule will not become effective until 120 days after publication in the Federal Register, and covered employers will be required to comply with the Final Rule by that effective date, which could come as early as August this year.  By the FTC’s own estimate, this ban could affect up to one-in-five American workers.

In the latest sign that federal enforcers remain focused on increasing antitrust enforcement, last Thursday, the Justice Department (DOJ), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealed an online portal, HealthyCompetition.gov, to encourage the public to submit reports on potential anticompetitive and monopolistic conduct in the healthcare sector.  The initiative seeks to address concerns that such behavior may affect healthcare affordability and quality, and employee wages. 

On March 30, 2021, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it voted in unanimous, bipartisan fashion (4-0) to file a complaint to block Illumina’s proposed acquisition of Grail. Illumina sells next-generation gene sequencing (NGS) equipment and consumables, while Grail is developing a multi-cancer early detection test that uses Illumina’s NGS platform. The FTC alleges a vertical theory of harm whereby the merger would give Illumina both the incentive and ability to disadvantage Grail’s multi-cancer testing competitors by raising their costs for, or by foreclosing them from, accessing Illumina’s must-have NGS technology. This is the first time in recent memory that the FTC is challenging a vertical merger in court; it represents the FTC’s first challenge under newly issued Vertical Merger Guidelines; and it is the first suit filed under Acting FTC Chair Rebecca Slaughter—all of which demonstrates that the FTC is likely to take a more aggressive approach to vertical merger enforcement for at least the next four years.