King & Spalding’s antitrust lawyers provide sophisticated, solution-oriented advice to healthcare companies on all aspects of antitrust law--from civil and criminal litigation and government investigations to counseling on sales and marketing practices and approval for mergers, acquisitions and strategic transactions. Chambers USA has recognized our antitrust lawyers as “a sharp, practical, business-oriented group” who provide “a great mix of theory and practicality.” We also have been singled out for excellence by The American Lawyer and The Best Lawyers in America, among others. Nightingale Healthcare News has identified our Group as having one of the “Outstanding Healthcare Antitrust Lawyers” in the United States.
Our expertise includes advising clients in various segments of the healthcare industry, such as health systems, hospitals, hospital networks, physician practices, physician networks, and physician-hospital networks. Matters in which our antitrust lawyers are frequently involved deal with advising hospitals and physicians on managed care contract negotiations and terminations, structuring messenger model networks and financially and clinically integrated IPAs and PHOs, conducting antitrust audits of hospital and physician networks, and defending hospitals and physicians networks against claims by competitors, payors or the government. Our healthcare clients also turn to us for counseling on benchmarking, distribution, marketing, pricing, and trade association participation.
We are equally skilled at planning and implementing strategies to gain antitrust clearances and approvals for our clients’ mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures. In many of our matters, we team with corporate and regulatory lawyers in our nationally-recognized Healthcare Practice Group to ensure we meet our clients’ objectives and to deepen our expertise relating to the services, products and markets involved.
Our antitrust lawyers include several who have served in significant positions within the U.S. antitrust enforcement agencies, including the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Criminal Enforcement at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. We also take pride in our excellent relationships with the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, which enables us to keep our healthcare clients abreast of the latest antitrust developments and to obtain favorable results for our clients. For example, for one of our physician messenger model network clients, we were recently able to get the FTC to close a price fixing and concerted refusal to deal investigation that was prompted by complaints raised by some of the major national payors. Similarly, we were recently able to get the FTC to close a lengthy merger investigation of one of our hospital system client’s acquisition of a competitor.
We regularly appear before all key competition authorities including the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, State Attorneys General and the European Commission. We routinely provide antitrust compliance and training programs to in-house counsel and business clients.
By partnering with in-house counsel on our matters, our Healthcare Antitrust lawyers make the commitment to understand each client’s business and legal needs so we can set forth a course of action that is cost-effective and efficient.
