Profile: James F Rill

Competition

Biography: Competition

James Rill, one of America's foremost antitrust attorneys, has served as assistant attorney general of the US Department of Justice's antitrust division and chairman of the ABA's antitrust section. As assistant attorney general, he negotiated the US-European Union Antitrust Cooperation Agreement of 1991 and issued the first joint FTC and DoJ Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 1992. He was responsible for initiating the largest number of merger challenges in over a decade, including challenges to major bank mergers and airline asset transactions.

In 1997, Mr Rill was appointed by attorney general Janet Reno and assistant attorney general Joel Klein to serve as co-chair on the US Department of Justice's International Competition Policy Advisory Committee, mandated to recommend future policy initiatives to the DoJ. Recommendations in the committee's report, submitted in February 2000, are being pursued in the US and overseas.

Since joining Howrey in 2000, he has engaged in an active and diverse antitrust practice, representing companies like Merck, Univision, Nestlé, Fortune Brands, Bertelsmann, Qualcomm, Intel and Verizon. In addition to representing clients before US antitrust agencies, Mr Rill represents clients in matters before many overseas agencies, including the Competition Directorate of the European Commission, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, France's Conseil de la Concurrence, the Japan Fair Trade Commission and the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission. He is immediate past chair of the Competition Committee of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the OECD, co-chair of the International Chamber of Commerce Competition Commission's task force on ICN and chair of the American Bar Association international task force.