Legal News

From time to time, those seminal cases we all studied during the early parts of our career pop up in practice. We’re all familiar with them: the snail in the bottle in Donoghue v Stevenson; the spurious sounding flu remedy in Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Co — the list goes on....By: Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner

Just as quickly as the U.S. Department of Commerce announced the parameters of prohibitions on transactions involving TikTok and WeChat, pursuant to Executive Orders 13942 and 13943, respectively, actions were taken to delay implementation of those prohibitions.  The Executive Orders, issued simultaneously on August 6, 2020, broadly indicated that “transactions” involving TikTok (and its parent company ByteDance) or WeChat would be prohibited as of September 20, 2020....By: Bryan Cave Leighto...

Summer 2020 was characterized by two significant news items: one in the area of merger control and the other in the area of restrictive practices. ..On 28 August 2020, the French Competition Authority prohibited a merger for the first time since its creation. This transaction involved the takeover of a hypermarket in the Troyes agglomeration and the proposed remedies were not sufficient to address the competition concerns identified by the Authority. ..A little earlier, the French Supreme...By...

BCLP’s global Antitrust & Competition team have been tracking the various ways COVID-19 is impacting antitrust enforcement, merger control, state aid and foreign direct investment rules ("FDI") in key jurisdictions around the world. Here are some user friendly one-page maps which highlight the key impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic is having – and may have – on competition law and FDI rules - worldwide....By: Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner

The long-awaited modernization of German securities law has begun! Two Germany ministries have jointly published a draft law introducing a regime for dematerialized securities (electronic securities), including crypto securities, which provides for classic securities function such as bona fide acquisition. In the past, only certain electronic German government bonds could be issued in that way....By: Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner

A takeover of a French company carrying on so-called ‘sensitive’ activity in France by a company ultimately controlled by foreigners - European Union and non-EU - is subject to the prior authorization of the Ministry of the Economy, Industry and Digital Sector. The recent increase in foreign direct investment authorization requests and the announced veto position of the French state on the Photonis/Teledyne prompts us to review the main aspects of this authorization procedure and its...By: Bry...

When COVID-19 hit, both insurers and the insured had to grapple with policy claims and whether a product responded to the crisis. This was no different in the construction industry where parties had to examine their policy language to understand if the damage sustained by the pandemic was the same damage they could claim for under insurance....By: Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner

In Hinterberger v. City of Indianapolis, the Seventh Circuit recently reminded litigants of their unyielding obligation to follow local rules. Hinterberger, --- F.3d ---, No. 19-3365, 2020 WL 3980690 (7th Cir. 2020). In that case, a real-estate developer (the “Developer”) brought eight claims, including constitutional claims, in the Southern District of Indiana against the City of Indianapolis (the “City”) and others arising from a failed development project in Indianapolis’s midtown area.....

On July 23, 2020, the French Competition Authority (the "Authority") published its new guidelines on merger control (the "Guidelines"), after more than two years of consultations and discussions. These Guidelines, which replace, effective immediately, the previous guidelines published in July 2013, are binding on companies before the Authority and directly enforceable by the parties to a merger....By: Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner

After a decade of relatively stable deal activity across Europe and globally, companies now find themselves operating in a new and evolving M&A environment. Transactional risk and disruption are the current norm, but against that backdrop of uncertainty, there are also opportunities. Distressed M&A has come back to the fore and we are starting to see interesting developments in deal strategy and negotiation tactics. We believe some of these developments are here to stay. It is clear that just.....