Biography: Competition

Daniel G Swanson is a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, with offices in Los Angeles and Brussels. He has co-chaired Gibson Dunn's antitrust and trade regulations practice group since 1996, and specialises in domestic and international antitrust and competition law, including civil and criminal litigation, internal investigations, and counselling. He is a member of the California and Brussels bars and is a solicitor of England and Wales. He received his law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and holds PhD and Masters degrees in economics from Harvard University.

Mr Swanson has been a trial and appellate litigator for more than 25 years, dealing with antitrust cases in a wide array of industries. He also counsels clients on mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures, and handles merger-clearance matters before the FTC, DOJ, and European Commission, and merger-related civil litigation. Mr Swanson's practice has encompassed virtually every aspect of antitrust and competition law. He has litigated claims of alleged monopolisation and market dominance, predation, leveraging, bundling, standard setting, tying, exclusive dealing, vertical and horizontal price fixing, group boycotts, refusals to deal, and price discrimination, among others, and has handled scores of class action lawsuits.

Mr Swanson frequently represents clients in connection with antitrust grand jury investigations, plea negotiations, and amnesty, leniency and immunity applications in the United States and the European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Latin America, including more than a dozen amnesty and leniency matters and more than 20 international cartel investigations during the last 12 years. Mr Swanson served as a non-governmental adviser (NGA) to the cartels working group of the International Competition Network (ICN) and participated as a speaker at the 2006 Annual ICN Meeting. In 2010, he advised the Competition Commission of India on 'best practices' in cartel enforcement as part of a joint IBA-ABA delegation.

As a fully-qualified EU member state practitioner, as well as a US lawyer, Mr Swanson regularly handles international antitrust and competition matters. He is an officer of the antitrust committee of the International Bar Association and served on the editorial board of the IBA's publication Competition Law International from 2007-2012. He is also a member of the competition section of the Law Society of England and Wales. He has served as co-chair of the ABA's international antitrust law committee (2002-06) and as editor-in-chief of the antitrust section's First Supplement to Competition Laws Outside the United States (2005).

Mr Swanson frequently addresses antitrust matters involving patents, copyrights and other intellectual property rights and testified regarding his views on standard setting in the DOJ-FTC hearings regarding competition and intellectual property law and policy. He is the author (with Professor William J Baumol) of Reasonable and Nondiscriminatory (RAND) Royalties, Standards Selection, and Control of Market Power and The New Economy and Ubiquitous Competitive Price Discrimination, which the US Supreme Court cited in Illinois Tool Works v Independent Ink (2006). Mr Swanson also serves as an NGA to the ICN unilateral conduct working group.

Mr Swanson is a regular speaker on antitrust and has contributed to leading journals and treatises (including Antitrust Law Developments, Competition Laws Outside the United States, The Antitrust Adviser, and the Antitrust Law Journal).

Additional office in Brussels:

Avenue Louise 480

1050 Brussels

Belgium