GeyerGorey Alumnus and “Friend of the Firm” Allen Grunes, now founding partner of innovative KonkurrenzGroup.Com, handicaps Sprint T-Mobile Bid at Politico.

GeyerGorey Alumni and “Friend of the Firm” Allen Grunes, now founding partner of innovative KonkurrenzGroup.Com, handicaps Sprint T-Mobile Bid at Politico:

Politico
TOP TALKER: SPRINT’S T-MOBILE BID — OVER AND OUT — ….

‘If true, it shows that reality has finally sunk in,’ said Allen Grunes, a former Justice Department antitrust attorney and founder of the Konkurrenz Group. ‘All the signs suggested a Sprint/T-Mobile deal would run into major opposition, and I can’t imagine parties making a deal when they know that a lawsuit is all but inevitable.'” 

Contact KonkurrenzGroup here.

Stucke and Grunes quoted in NYT: “When Media Mergers Limit More Than Competition”

And this is simply to apply the same standards to a Fox-Time Warner combination that the Justice Department applies to all industries, whether they make cement, household appliances or movies. “When you’re dealing with media, you’ve got to look more carefully at the impact than with other commodities,” said Allen P. Grunes, an antitrust lawyer at the firm GeyerGorey, and an author, with Maurice E. Stucke, of “Antitrust and the Marketplace of Ideas.” “It has an impact on democracy and what the public discourse is.”

To look only at price competition and economic efficiency “makes no sense whatsoever” in the media context, added Mr. Stucke, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. In their article, published in 2001 while both were lawyers with the antitrust division in Washington, they argued that any analysis of competition in media mergers should include the impact on “the marketplace of ideas,” where competition “advances truth.”

GeyerGorey LLP’s Grunes and Stucke in Roll Call: Another ‘Too Big to Fail’ Merger From Comcast’s Playbook

“Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first hearing to examine the merger of the nation’s top two cable operators, Comcast and Time Warner Cable. But the merger no longer has the air of inevitability it once did. What happened?

People who are studying this merger do not like what they see for many reasons. Here are three: less innovation, greater market power over high-speed broadband and higher prices and poorer service for consumers. Companies confronted with Comcast’s bargaining power, like Netflix, are speaking out. And, unusually for an antitrust case, the public is taking notice: 52 percent of Americans in a recent Reuters poll believed that this deal would reduce competition and be bad for consumers….”

Another ‘Too Big to Fail’ Merger From Comcast’s Playbook, Roll Call, April 17, 2014

Click on link above….

Maurice Stucke comments on Comcast deal to CNNMoney

Comcast deal to face antitrust hurdles

“”The FCC is going to be the wild card,” said Maurice Stucke, antitrust law professor at the University of Tennessee and an attorney at law firm GeyerGorey. “This is the opportunity for the new chief to take a stance and become a vocal regulator.””

Allen Grunes comments on Comcast merger in Gigaom and Wall Street Journal’


Everything you need to know about the proposed $45B Comcast-Time Warner merger

“Allen Grunes, an antitrust lawyer with GeyerGorey LLP, told the Wall Street Journal: ‘There’s very little political will right now in the U.S. to keep pipes and content separate, or to limit the national reach of a cable company like Comcast. My guess is that if Comcast is able to make some serious and enforceable commitments to the FCC, the deal will go through.'” 

Compliance Week Examines Maurice E. Stucke’s Recent Research on Compliance Programs

Compliance Week’s review of the latest working paper by GeyerGorey’s Maurice Stucke affirms the nagging doubts commonly shared by compliance officers and inside counsel alike about the effectiveness of their compliance programs.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRLog (Press Release) – Jan. 22, 2014 – WASHINGTON, D.C. — “An eye-opening academic paper.” That was the response to Maurice E. Stucke’s latest working paper, In Search of Effective Ethics & Compliance Programs, which Compliance Week reviewed recently.

As Professor Stucke explains, the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s Organizational Guidelines for over twenty years have offered firms a significant financial incentive to develop an ethical organizational culture. Nonetheless, corporate crime persists. Too many ethics programs remain ineffective. As his article argues, the Guidelines’ current approach is not working. The evidence, which includes sentencing data over the past twenty years, reveals that few firms have effective ethics and compliance programs. Nor is there much hope that the Guidelines’ incentives will induce companies, after the economic crisis, to become more ethical.

The problem is not compliance per se. The empirical research, while still developing, suggests that compliance efforts can be effective, and that effective compliance is attainable for many companies. The problem, Professor Stucke identifies, is attributable to an extrinsic, incentive-based approach to compliance, which does not cure, and likely contributes to, the problem of ineffective compliance.

In his article, What You Believe About Effective Compliance, And What Works, Matt Kelly summarizes Prof. Stucke’s piece,

Good news for chief compliance officers frustrated with the effectiveness of your compliance program, or the lack thereof: you are correct to feel that way.

That’s the conclusion of an eye-opening academic paper, “In Search of Effective Ethics & Compliance Programs,” published last month by University of Tennessee law professor Maurice Stucke. If you ever wanted to confirm that nagging feeling you have that maybe our approach to building compliance programs and deeming them effective isn’t quite right, read this 88-page paper immediately.

Professor Stucke is part of GeyerGorey’s compliance team, which blends its experience in enforcement, in-house counseling, criminal and civil defense, and qui tam litigation, to help companies efficiently identify, address, and mitigate litigation risks from the onset and develop an organizational culture that encourages ethical conduct and a commitment to comply with the law.

Compliance Week:What You Believe About Effective Compliance, And What Works

Compliance Week focuses on Maurice E Stucke’s “In Search of Effective Ethics and Compliance Programs

“Stucke’s premise is that our current compliance ecosystem—regulators,
prosecutors, boards, CEOs, compliance officers—is extrinsic in nature,
imposing compliance demands upon Corporate America from the outside, with the
threat of punishment if your program is ineffective. The problem? The
assumptions behind an extrinsic system don’t hold up in the real world. So
companies end up seeking to invest the least amount necessary, to satisfy the
smallest number of compliance obligations possible, leaving employees still
tempted to commit misconduct. Lovely…”.

How the FTC’s Hertz Antitrust Fix Went Flat – Professor Maurice Stucke; WSJ.com

How the FTC’s Hertz Antitrust Fix Went Flat
Wall Street Journal
December 8, 2013

Maurice Stucke, a University of Tennessee professor and lawyer with GeyerGorey LLP, said the latest Advantage bankruptcy ought to prompt some soul-searching by the FTC and the Justice Department.

If merger settlements “are going to be business as usual, the agencies need to spend more time examining how their remedies work out over the long haul,” he said. “You would think there could be more safeguards to prevent this from happening.”

“My take is this deal is dead” states Allen Grunes in Bloomberg: “AMR-US Airways Antitrust Suit Seen as Difficult to Settle”

From Bloomberg:

The challenge brought by the U.S. Justice Department can be compared with its lawsuit seeking to block AT&T Inc. (T)’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile USA Inc. in 2011, said Allen Grunes, an antitrust lawyer with GeyerGorey LLP. AT&T eventually dropped its bid for T-Mobile. “My take is that the deal is dead,” Grunes said. “Based on the complaint, this merger doesn’t look like it can be fixed with divestitures or slot sales.”

Read More By Clicking Below:

AMR-US Airways Antitrust Suit Seen as Difficult to Settle

 

“Upstart Start-Up” GeyerGorey LLP Opens Dallas Office

“Rocketing from two to eleven attorneys in eight months, GeyerGorey LLP sports over 200 years of cross-disciplinary prosecutorial experience involving a host of domestic and international industries where each of its attorneys has worked on internal investigations and high stakes cases for an average of more than 20 years.”

For more, click the link below:

-12191777-upstart-start-up-geyergorey-llp-opens-dallas-office