Biography: Competition

Joseph Kattan is a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher's Washington, DC, office. His practice focuses on antitrust litigation, counselling and enforcement agency matters. Mr Kattan's areas of concentration include mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property antitrust, high-technology antitrust, and international antitrust. He has represented a broad range of companies in antitrust litigation, arbitrations, government investigations, and counselling assignments.

Mr Kattan's representations have spanned a broad range of industries. He has represented clients in the semiconductor, computer, software, internet, media, music, consumer electronics, chemical, medical technology, financial services, oil field services, health care, pharmaceuticals, soft drink, travel, and information services industries, among others.

Mr Kattan has shepherded numerous mergers and acquisitions in a broad range of industries through the antitrust review process in the United States and abroad, including many second-request investigations. In the M&A area, he has represented Intel in its acquisitions of McAfee, Wind River, Chips & Technologies, and Digital Equipment's manufacturing operations, and its flash memory joint ventures with STMicroelectronics and Micron; Applied Materials in its acquisitions of Varian, Semitool, Brooks Software, Baccini, and Applied Films; Seagate in its acquisition of Maxtor; Sony Music in its merger with BMG; Conexant in its acquisition of GlobespanVirata; and Cadence Design Systems in its acquisitions of Denali, Verisity, Simplex and Plato Design Systems; Schlumberger in its oil field services joint venture with Baker Hughes; PeopleSoft in its acquisition of JD Edwards; Barq's in its acquisition by Coca-Cola; and Computer Sciences in successfully opposing Computer Associates' hostile tender offer.

Mr Kattan has broad experience in the areas of high-technology and intellectual property antitrust. He has represented clients in a number of significant litigations and government investigations involving the intersection of intellectual property and antitrust, including several standard-setting matters. In the patent antitrust field, he represented Intel in litigations against the Federal Trade Commission, VIA Technologies, and Intergraph Corporation; Unocal in litigation against the FTC; and Sony in private antitrust litigations involving patent pooling. He has also represented Intel in all of its antitrust litigations and investigations in the past 15 years in the United States and abroad.

Mr Kattan has served as chair of the intellectual property committee and vice chair of the computer industry committee of the ABA's section of antitrust law. He has published numerous articles in scholarly and professional publications and has spoken regularly on antitrust and intellectual property issues at leading antitrust conferences and programmes. He served for several years as an editor of the American Bar Association's Antitrust Magazine.

Mr Kattan has testified at many government-sponsored hearings on antitrust policy, including the joint DoJ-FTC hearings on single firm conduct, the DoJ-FTC hearings on intellectual property and antitrust, the DoJ-FTC merger enforcement workshops, the FTC's global competition hearings, and the FTC's joint venture policy hearings. In 2004, he served as a member of the ABA's quadrennial task force on the federal antitrust agencies. Mr Kattan has also advised foreign competition authorities on matters of antitrust policy.

Before entering private practice, Mr Kattan headed the office of policy and evaluation in the Federal Trade Commission's bureau of competition.