DOJ, FTC to Explore Amending Merger Guidelines

23 September 2009

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission announced on Tuesday that they will explore updating their horizontal merger guidelines, the first such change in 17 years.

Christine Varney, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said the government would hold a series of public workshops to assess potential changes to the guidelines, which antitrust enforcers use to measure the competitive effects of proposed mergers. Varney, who spoke at a Georgetown Law Center symposium on antitrust law Tuesday, said the assessment would examine whether the current guidelines accurately reflect agency practice.

“As the guidelines themselves state, they are not meant to be static documents fixing in stone the agencies’ analytical framework,” she said. “Instead, as the guidelines note in their opening section, they ‘may be revised from time to time as necessary to reflect any significant changes in enforcement policy or to clarify aspects of existing policy.'”

For the full article from the National Law Journal and a link to Christine Varney’s full comments click here.