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Over the past few years, the Justice Department has been hard at work on a comprehensive update to the way it detects, investigates, and prosecutes price-fixing cartels. Several recent announcements, including at last week’s ABA White Collar Conference, preview the DOJ Antitrust Division’s next steps in this generational shift—the goals of which are to refine disclosure incentives, promote individual accountability, and obtain trial convictions.
First, on March 7, 2024, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced the DOJ is kicking off a 90-day whistleblower “policy sprint”; the finish line is a new program to complement existing regulators’ programs, rewarding qualifying whistleblowers for bringing non-public, previously unknown misconduct to the DOJ’s attention. The Antitrust Division has long sought to encourage individual self-reporting as a complement to its corporate VSD policy, so expect that this initiative will aim to improve that incentive structure. Next, the DOJ updated the Justice Manual to incorporate the M&A safe harbor policy that it announced last fall. Notably for antitrust practitioners, the JM updates included changes to the Antitrust Division’s leniency policy that provide much-needed clarification on how companies that detect potential collusion at an M&A target can avoid inheriting those liabilities by promptly reporting to DOJ. Third, senior Antitrust Division officials continue to emphasize that they are focused on developing investigations through affirmative investigative techniques, such as wiretaps and whistleblowers.