Tad Lipsky

Tad Lipsky

Co-Chair of the International Task Force, American Bar Association Section of Antitrust Law

From 1981-83 Mr. Lipsky served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General under William F. Baxter, President Reagan's first chief antitrust enforcement official, who sparked profound antitrust-law changes.  In that position Mr. Lipsky supervised Supreme Court litigation in a series of groundbreaking antitrust cases.  He also supervised preparation of the 1982 Department of Justice Merger Guidelines, which profoundly altered and have since become the dominant model for antitrust analysis of mergers, acquisitions and other structural transactions throughout the world. He also organized and supervised the Antitrust Division's review of United States v. IBM Corp., which culminated in a joint stipulation of dismissal without prejudice of the marathon case in 1982.  He served as co-chair of the Transition Team for the Federal Trade Commission following the election of President Donald Trump, and following his retirement in February, 2017 after fifteen years of partnership at Latham & Watkins, LLP, served as the Acting Director of FTC’s Bureau of Competition until July, 2017.

Mr. Lipsky served as chief antitrust lawyer for The Coca-Cola Company from 1992-2002 and has incomparable experience with antitrust in the US, EU, Canada, Japan and other established antitrust law regimes throughout the world, as well as in new and emerging antitrust law systems in scores of jurisdictions that adopted free-market institutions following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.  For several decades he has participated in a variety of efforts to streamline antitrust enforcement around the world, improve the quality of antitrust analysis, harmonize international views on the fundamental objective of antitrust law, and assure that antitrust procedures are accurate, efficient and impartial both in reality and as perceived.

Mr. Lipsky served as the first International Officer of the American Bar Association Section of Antitrust Law from 2001-03. He served on the Editorial Board of Competition Laws Outside the United States (2001), the most ambitious annotated compilation of non-US competition laws yet produced.  He has held a variety of senior positions among the officers and governing Council of the Section of Antitrust Law and continues to serve as a co-chair of the Section's International Task Force.  He has written, spoken and testified frequently on subjects in antitrust law, economics and policy.  He has served as a co-chair of the International Competition Policy Working Group of the US Chamber of Commerce, and participated as a member of the International Competition Policy Expert’s Group that recently published its Report and Recommendations (March 2017) on needed reforms of international antitrust-law enforcement.

Mr. Lipsky is admitted to practice before the US Supreme Court and various federal appellate courts. Mr. Lipsky holds a J.D. (Stanford Law School, 1976) and an M.A. in Economics (Stanford University, 1976).



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