SURVEY OF COMPETITION LAWYERS

This survey is part of a study on the effectiveness of competition law that the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission has commissioned to Lear.

The survey contains a number of questions on the enforcement of competition legislation in the jurisdiction where you practice and on your perception about its effectiveness. It takes less than 15 minutes to reply to the whole questionnaire.

The questions cover the period from 2000-2007. If your experience in advising firms on antitrust matters as a private practitioner is more limited, please refer only to this latter period.

The questions refer only to the enforcement of all the competition legislations that apply in the jurisdiction where you practice. For example in EU countries it refers both to the European legislation and to the national legislation of the Member State, and in the US it refers to the national and federal legislation.

Some questions ask for your judgement on how competition legislation(s) is enforced in your jurisdiction. If more than one body is responsible for the enforcement of this legislation, or parts of it, please give your view on their overall effectiveness.

In some questions we refer to overall results of the proceeding for the investigated firm, in this case we refer to the final outcome of the case, which may entail an appeal at a judicial court.

Mergers, which do not represent a competition law infringement, are treated separately. There are two questions only on this topic at the end of the questionnaire.

Please note that if you advise clients in more than one jurisdiction, you should limit your answer to the jurisdiction where you operate the most, or you could answer the questionnaire more than once, each time focusing only on one jurisdiction.

If you advise clients in one of the EU member states, and you work both on cases decided by the national competition authority and on cases decided by the European Commission you have to select as your jurisdiction either that country or the EU. Hence, if you are a lawyer that works in Italy and follow cases that are decided in Bruxelles, you have to decide whether your jurisdiction is Italy or the EU. In the former case your answer should refer only to the activity of the Italian National Competition Authority (i.e. AGCM), while in the latter only to the activity of the European Commission. If you have sufficient experience in both jurisdictions we would appreciate if you could answer the questionnaire twice, one for your national jurisdiction and one for the EU jurisdiction.

Confidentiality

We would like to highlight again that your response will be treated with the outmost confidentiality. Not even the European Commission will see the answers to individual questionnaires. The European Commission will only be provided with the consolidated data, that summarises all the responses and does not allow to trace the individual respondents. The report that will contain the result of this study will also include only the consolidated data, from which it will be impossible to identify the individual respondents.

Instructions on how to fill in the questions

Please note that:

-        Many of the questions ask for your evaluation of the probability that certain events take place. You should base your response on your experience.

-         Please read carefully the instructions before responding to each question, because in some cases you are asked to tick the relevant box or boxes while in other you are asked to rank the answers or to provide a figure.

-         If you are asked to tick the relevant answers and more than one option applies, please tick all the relevant boxes.

-         If the question asked or the options given are not relevant to your jurisdiction please select the option Not Applicable, but do not leave any closed question unanswered.

The terminology

Abuse of a dominant position refers to the same infringement as an attempt to monopolise or a unilateral conduct.

Hard-core cartel refers to all those horizontal agreements that involve price-fixing, bid rigging or market-sharing.

Other anti-competitive agreements refer to all those horizontal and vertical agreements, other than hard core-cartels, which are considered as unlawful by the competition legislation in your jurisdiction.

Formal investigation refers to the situation where an enforcement body decides to investigate in-depth a potential infringement of the competition legislation. Only a formal investigation can lead to the conviction of the firms involved in an infringement.

Enforcement body refers to those bodies responsible for enforcing the competition legislation, where by enforcing we mean investigating potential infringements and, when relevant, imposing sanctions. In some jurisdictions there may be more than one body, either because there are different layers of legislation (e.g. national and federal in the US) or because they enforce different parts of the legislation (e.g. the OFT and the Competition Commission in the UK).

Getting started

To start answering the questionnaire click here.

Remember to click on the "submit" button once you have completed the questionnaire!

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