Competition

Successfully understanding and navigating all aspects of national and international competition law is increasingly critical to all aspects of business. This ranges from the application of domestic and international merger control laws to understanding how competition law applies to commercial agreements (including those between competitors) and how it regulates the behaviour of undertakings who enjoy a dominant market position for a particular good or service.

We offer a partner-led service, delivering pragmatic and commercial advice tailored to your specific needs.  Our competition team is experienced in advising on both transactional and behavioural (day-to-day) aspects of competition law, including before regulators in the UK and the EU.  We are focused on giving advice both reactively (for example, in defence of complaints or investigations brought by third parties or regulators) and pro-actively, ensuring you are best placed to use competition law as a tool where appropriate to protect your commercial interests.

We can advise on all aspects of UK and EU competition and anti-trust law, including:

• Mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures
• Cartel investigations
• Commercial agreements
• Compliance programmes and audits 
• Dawn raids - working alongside our Regulatory group and our Tax Disputes team, we can deliver a seamless and rapid response service to all forms of regulatory investigations, whether the enforcement agency is a competition, tax or financial regulator
• Abuse of a dominant position

We are also ideally placed to advise on international competition issues (merger and anti-trust) through our links with independent law firms globally via our membership of the TerraLex independent legal association.

Selected directory listings

• "Clients value [Stephen Smith's] 'experience, depth of knowledge and the practical and innovative ways in which this is communicated'. His expertise extends to all key areas of competition law, including merger control and antitrust investigations" - Chambers UK 2013

For more information please contact Stephen Smith (stephen.smith@rpc.co.uk). You can read our Competition publications here or our Regulatory Blog here.