Chances are you first become aware that your company is a target or subject of a criminal antitrust investigation when you receive a grand jury subpoena, or worse, when federal agents show up with a search warrant asking questions. This is serious business, given the consequences. Among the many questions experienced antitrust counsel will ask you early on is whether you have an antitrust compliance program, and if so, how it is set up and operates. In recent years, the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) assigned no weight to the existence of a ...
This is not about restrictions on how you cook your eggs or hunt game out of season.
But read on if you are an employer and want to know about a serious and growing antitrust risk, heightened by federal and state antitrust enforcement as well as private litigation. Agreements to refrain from soliciting another company’s employees (“no poaching” agreements) face increased scrutiny — with potential criminal consequences. In close alignment, there is a spate of new “wage-fixing” cases, a variant of price fixing.
It all started with three cases brought by antitrust ...
