Corporate Law Blog

Making the merger review process more efficient, P.2

In our previous post, we began speaking about how companies can make the merger review process more efficient for themselves. As we noted, one important way to do this is by getting in contact with the Federal Trade Commission early on in the process and maintaining good communications along the way so that the agency is able to evaluate data as efficiently as possible.

In addition to early communication, businesses participating in the merger review process are advised to present their data in a manner which is easily organized and interpreted by the Federal Trade Commission. In addition to providing data that is actually helpful for the investigating agency, parties to the review process should provide sufficient detail about the data and adequate explanation regarding the methodology used to arrive at any conclusions about the data.

The general idea here is that, because the merger and acquisition review process can take a fair amount of time and resources, it is important to do everything as efficiently as possible to ensure that no time or resources are wasted. Working with an attorney experienced in dealing with the review process can help with this.

One the reasons the merger review process takes longer than it otherwise could is that it isn’t only one agency that handles the review process. As we previously noted, both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice can review merger and acquisition proposals. A recent proposal in the House of Representatives, though, would change things around to streamline the process. We’ll look at this proposal in our next post.