Stacy Frazier

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Clifford Chance Podcast, where we discuss issues and trends faced by the business world today. I'm Stacey Frazier, a partner at Clifford Chance based in Washington, DC, and today I'm asking some of my antitrust teammates to share some highlights from the 2026 Antitrust Spring Meeting week.
I'll start with a quick personal note. I just joined Clifford Chance right before the Spring

Meeting, and I had a blast connecting with old and new colleagues and surrounding myself with the latest antitrust developments. There's a lot going on in antitrust 2026, as my colleagues are about to tell you. So let's get into it. First, we'll throw to Michael Van Arsdall, another partner in our Washington, DC office. Michael, what was the highlight for you?

Michel Van Arsdall

Thank you, Stacy. We had a great ABA Spring Meeting week. It was wonderful to see all our colleagues from around the globe. We had over 25 lawyers in from all our various jurisdictions. It was a fantastic week, our signature event.
For the Antitrust Roundtable reception, which was a panel discussion on deals that fund ideas, specifically focusing on innovation and access to capital markets, we had over 300 guests at the Conrad, which was a really wonderful event. It was great to see everybody.
Of course, there's many wonderful panels at the Spring Meeting. I was focused particularly on the merger enforcement in the US and the great number of speakers that hit it from a variety of different angles. One of the largest departures from the previous administration was a renewed willingness to reach settlements. We've seen this in the recent synopsis decision. Some identified this an example of settlements being an opportunity for agencies to save resources and allow deals to move forward.
And it's interesting that while settlements are back on the table, there's still a strong preference for structural remedies. Of course, the recent settlement by the DOJ and its enforcement action against Live Nation suggests that even mid-trial is never too late to discuss settlement, but that may not be a strategy that others want to adopt.
Another interesting topic that we've seen in the US is the states expanding their antitrust capacity and asserting independent priorities, particularly in the areas of housing and healthcare and food, sometimes working with the federal enforcers and sometimes not. There's been a lot of political rhetoric around the state enforcement, and there's been some divergence among the enforcement bodies, but the state HSR statues have really been designed to reduce friction, but not necessarily to reinvent merger review. The core policy motivation, it seems, behind the state HSR laws are that they are looking for expanding their authority, but also having access to information sooner in the process than they've had in the past. And it's not necessarily going to be an automatic alignment between the federal government and the states. Of course, the states are heavily invested in more consumer facing markets with direct local impact. This could be grocery stores, consumer goods, housing and labor market. Those are the real bread and butter issues, but tech issues are not off the table, but those tend to be broader reaching that have a larger impact for certain states. So all in all very interesting on the merger enforcement front, lot of great ideas, lot of great panels and it was a really productive week.

Stacy Frazier

Thanks, Michael. I had the pleasure of moderating the roundtable discussion at the Conrad. We had regulators from both the US and the EU able to join us, and they were quite candid about how they balanced the need for innovation with the need to protect competitive markets. They were clear that they consider a merger's impact on competition case by case. In other words, they said there was no baseline assumption that mergers are inherently innovation-reducing. I think this will be an ongoing conversation, particularly as the DG Comp revises its merger guidelines. But next, let's turn to Danielle Morello, a counsel at Clifford Chance right here in Washington, DC, with me. She's also a great antitrust litigator.

Danielle Morello

Thanks, Stacy. It was a really busy week. I moderated our antitrust litigation discussion among trial counsel across jurisdictions. We had Will Lavery and you were with us from the US, Ben Jasper from the UK and Jotte Mulder from the Netherlands. And we discussed whether international convergence of antitrust enforcement is really dead in 2026, and compared enforcement trends across jurisdictions. And the high-level takeaways were really quite interesting, I thought. I mean, on the one hand, we're seeing some expansion theories in the US from federal government enforcers at the same time that we're seeing some surprising settlements or decisions not to challenge certain deals. But we're also seeing some steady litigation posture and private actions. There isn't a lot of change there.
And that environment's really heavily contrasted with trends across the pond in the UK, where government enforcers are a bit quieter while the private enforcement is incredibly active, including through collective action cases. And then we have the EU that presents something of a middle ground with an active government and private enforcement regimes, including the maturing collective action program, and the EU has a similar but perhaps not totally analogous environment with its member states to the interplay between US federal and state enforcement, where some member states are taking more novel approaches than the European Commission. All in all, I felt a really healthy, lively conversational debate and discussion. Looking forward to continuing that discussion.

Stacy Frazier

Thanks Danielle, I really had a fun time on your panel and found it especially interesting to hear what's going on overseas. Speaking of which, let me bring in Milena Robotham, an antitrust partner in Brussels who's been doing a lot of work on AI.

Milena Robotham

Thank you, Stacy. My highlight of the ABA Spring meeting week was moderating a panel at the GCR Live Conference on AI and Transforming Markets. The panel covered lessons learned from tech enforcement cases that could be applied to the AI industry and it was really great to have a mix of in-house enforcer, economist and private practitioner voices. We discussed a range of topics, including how authorities in Europe have publicly aligned on vigilance across the AI space, how these authorities have highlighted risks around concentrated control of inputs such as compute, data, chips and talent, with interoperability and choice being positioned as key objectives. We also discussed how Web 2.0 enforcement tools for economic and legal assessment might be used today to evaluate the state of competition in AI and what might need to change, if anything, as we look to the future of antitrust enforcement in the AI space.
It was a great conversation with lots of audience and participant engagement, especially when we polled the room on how many chatbots they use on a weekly basis. The panel and conference overall was a standout for me in a week of really interesting and engaging events.

Stacy Frazier

Thanks, Milena. I'm sorry to have missed that one. Thanks for bringing us a few insights on a topic that I know is top of mind for everyone. Will, let's turn to you. Will Lavery is a partner in our DC office and another one of our fabulous litigators.

William Lavery

Thanks, Stacy. You know, I think the best part of the spring meeting every year, frankly, is catching up with old friends, colleagues, clients, and really the broader antitrust bar who all comes together in one place in DC. For anyone who's been practicing for over 20 years like I have, often people don't stay in the same place, having been at a few firms now, it's nice to see everybody together in one place.

This year though, our Clifford Chance-specific events were really the highlight for me. Our main reception was the best it's been in all the years I've attended in terms of turnout and overall energy. It was really fantastic. We also had an antitrust litigation event the night before that was extremely well attended. We had a great crowd and really strong engagement and I think that what makes both of our events work is they have real substance. So we had panels at both. It's not just drinks and small talk, which is also great obviously, but we had great panels, good substance, good speakers, and it ended up working out really well. I also thought it was a pretty good sign that people stayed late well after it was supposed to end, including some pretty senior government officials. That tells me that our events went well and people genuinely enjoyed them. So it was a great week overall, but I think overall our two events were the highlight for me and I know that we're planning to make them even better next year.

Stacy Frazier

I think that's what I really took away from the Spring Meeting as well, the true global reach of our colleagues and the scope of our work and abilities. As I said at the beginning, I'm a relative newcomer to the firm and it was really striking to see just how broad and deep our team is. There are a lot of great moments of connection on substance and strategy that already are carrying through to our work day-to-day, but thank you to everyone for taking the time to listen to some of our insights from the Spring Meeting week. You've been listening to the Clifford Chance Podcast. Please subscribe to our podcast and follow us on LinkedIn.