Practice Area Spotlight: Competition and regulatory – leading experts and high-profile cases

Business transactions regularly require a careful analysis from a competition law point of view. We at Prager Dreifuss have excellent expertise in advising and representing companies – small and large, local and global – as well as public entities in all aspects of competition law. With profound knowledge of Swiss and EU competition law, we regularly advise clients before the Swiss competition authorities, and frequently collaborate with foreign law firms in multi-jurisdictional cartel and merger proceedings, be it as team members or co-ordinators of international teams. Public procurement and state aid law also belong to our preferred areas of practice.
The well-established competition team is headed by Philipp Zurkinden (partner) and further consists of Marino Baldi (of counsel) and Bernhard Lauterburg (counsel). The team members have excellent academic and professional backgrounds, and contribute to legal commentaries and law journals on a regular basis. Baldi is without doubt a grey eminence of Swiss competition law, having authored the current law on cartels as well as having been a member of the Swiss Competition Commission for many years. Zurkinden also worked at the Swiss competition authority and is regularly ranked among the top competition lawyers in Switzerland. Together with Lauterburg the team has worked on many high-profile matters in all industry sectors before the Competition Commission and cantonal and federal courts.

The team joins excellent legal and economic knowledge, and quick comprehension of complex technological questions. We strive for both innovative and pragmatic solutions giving our clients the best value for money. With our wide network of competition law experts in other major jurisdictions, such as the EU and the US, and active ties to Swiss competition authorities and other branches of the federal administration, we ensure that all aspects, whether local, national or further afield, are taken care of.

Recent significant cases involved advising a ticketing company against restriction of competition by Switzerland’s prime ticketing company, which resulted in a successful verdict before the Federal Administrative Court and reversed the Competition Commission’s analysis; advising an airline on a wide range of regulatory questions, including state aid and public procurement; representing various financial institutions in the Competition Commission’s ongoing investigations into the financial services markets; representing a pharmaceutical company in an abuse-of-dominance case; as well as advising important companies in the ongoing cement and gravel and in a car-leasing investigation.

Prager Dreifuss is consistently ranked as an outstanding firm worldwide by leading publications, including Chambers, The Legal 500, IFLR1000 and Who’s Who Legal.

    

Prager Dreifuss’s competition and regulatory team: Philipp Zurkinden and Bernhard Lauterburg