Profile: Peter Alexiadis

Competition

Biography: Competition

Peter Alexiadis is the founding partner of the Brussels office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and a member of the firm's antitrust and trade regulation group. Since 1989, he has practised community law in Brussels, where he specialises in competition law, communications policy, and intellectual property. He is the holder of postgraduate legal qualifications from the Universities of London, Sydney and Thessaloniki.

Peter's communications practice spans all aspects of regulation, policy and competition law affecting the electronic communications sector, and is divided between advice for, and the defence of, private companies and counselling to government institutions. He has served as an external counsel to the Communications Unit at the European Commission's DG Competition (1999 - 2002) and was project leader for three studies for DG Information Society in 2007, namely, "Impact of Institutional Issues in the Review of the EU Framework for Electronic Communications", "The Consistent Application of Regulatory Measures in the Area of Electronic Communications and its Impact in the Internal Market", and "The Future of Next Generation Access - an Analysis of Potential Remedies". He has a particular expertise in market analysis, having performed such analyses for, among others, national regulatory authorities from Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Romania.

Peter's competition practice focuses on merger control and joint ventures, actions under Article 82 EC, complaints under the EC Treaty's state aids rules, and vertical distribution and licensing practices (both before the European Commission and national authorities). He has acted as senior European competition counsel in major TMT sector mergers such as Vodafone/Airtouch, MCI WorldCom/Sprint, Verizon/MCI, and Seagate/Maxtor, and was the briefing solicitor in the successful MCI v EC Commission appeal. He was also the Greek government's external legal adviser in its review of the Cosmote/Germanos merger in 2006.

His intellectual property practice consists primarily of advising clients on the interface between intellectual property rights protection and competition law, especially as regards to innovative products and services. He was one of a handful of European legal experts to be invited by the United States' DoJ and FTC in May 2002 to give testimony on hearings on 'The Antitrust and Intellectual Property Interface' in Washington DC.

Mr Alexiadis writes regularly on issues of competition law and practice and communications policy, and is the EC affairs editor of the European Intellectual Property Review and the Utilities Law Review. He has also been appointed as the editor of the "Media and Communications" chapter of Butterworth's loose-leaf Competition Law Service. He is also the coordinator of the LLM course Competition Law and Regulated Network Industries at King's College, London. He has also been a visiting lecturer since 2003 in communications law and competition policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and intellectual property issues at the Annual Brussels Seminar on the Law and Institutions of the European Union since 1995.

Mr Alexiadis is widely acknowledged in the professional press as a leader in his field in both competition law and communications law, having been named as one of the leading practitioners in Belgium and the European Union by all peer review publications for well over a decade. When joining the firm, Peter was included among The American Lawyer's "Star Laterals of the Year" for 2003.