Biography: Competition

Mélanie Thill-Tayara enjoys market-wide recognition for her practice as a litigator before competition authorities and courts, both at French and EU level. She has been involved in several landmark cartel and abuse of dominant position cases. She also has wide experience in assisting clients during "dawn raids" conducted by antitrust authorities and in leading the subsequent procedures to challenge the inspections.

She is also regularly involved in merger control procedures including the coordination of multi-filing operations. She has led a few significant merger control cases in France, in particular a widely publicised transaction involving unilateral effects.

Mélanie also assists clients in the organisation and implementation of legal audits, compliance programmes and employee-training sessions. In addition, she has been in charge of the legal development of international selective and exclusive distribution networks for several clients and regularly advises on the French mandatory rules relating to discounts and rebates.

Her clients include businesses from a wide range of sectors including, among others, luxury goods; pharmaceuticals and medical devices; cosmetic products and chemicals; publishing and press distribution; toys; various consumer products; media and telecoms; financial services.

Specifically in the life sciences area, Mélanie Thill-Tayara represents leading pharmaceutical and medical devices companies: she has assisted various laboratories with respect to the implementation of quota systems and reorganisation of their distribution schemes and in the subsequent judicial actions these systems have generated; she has also represented several clients in the field of abuse of dominant position further to actions initiated by generic companies; she recently assisted several life sciences groups during (and further to) dawn raids conducted by the competition authorities, leading in some cases to total or partial cancellation of the inspection.

Before joining Norton Rose LLP in Paris, Mélanie spent 18 years as partner of another leading international law firm. Prior to that she spent three years working for the European Commission at the Directorate General for Competition, during which time she acted in different emblematic cartel cases. She is a graduate of the University of Munich (diploma in political sciences, 1980), and the Sorbonne (maîtrise in international and European law, certificate of the University Centre of Community Studies, 1984; DEA in international private law and international trade law, 1985).

Mélanie regularly contributes to legal reviews and the legal pages of the financial and economic press. She is a regular speaker at various competition law conferences.

She is a member of the International Bar Association (IBA), the Association Française de l'Etude de la Concurrence (French Association for Competition Studies), the Association des Avocats Pratiquant le Droit de la Concurrence (APDC) and the Studienvereinigung Kartellrecht (the Antitrust Lawyers Association for Germany, Austria and Switzerland). She is a member of the Paris Bar and speaks French, German, English and Italian.

Other Practice Areas

Mélanie Thill-Tayara also features in the following practice areas:

• Life Sciences