Antitrust Risk Intake

Antitrust Risk Intake

Purpose

Take unstructured facts about conduct with possible competition-law exposure — a worried email, a proposed arrangement, a hotline report, an agency letter — and organize them into a conduct inventory and triage matrix that buckets each item, records preliminary risk indicators from the shared catalog, flags any time-critical track, and routes each item to the matched antitrust deep-dive skill. This is the front door of the antitrust-competition cluster, and its output is a draft for attorney review: every bucket and routing call is a workflow signal, never a legal classification or an assessment of legality.

Use When

• A business team forwards an email thread about a competitor contact, meeting, or "understanding" and asks legal whether it is a problem.
• Several loosely described conduct items arrive at once — a JV idea, a pricing move, a distributor complaint — and counsel needs them inventoried, bucketed, and routed before any deep-dive work.
• A hotline report, internal-audit finding, or news of an industry investigation raises possible exposure and the facts need structured intake.
• An agency letter, dawn-raid rumor, or pending merger notification makes it urgent to identify which track is time-critical.
• Counsel asks "which antitrust skill do I run on this?" and the answer needs a documented triage matrix with fact gaps listed per recommended deep-dive.

Required Inputs

• Jurisdiction(s) of competitive effect — every country and, where relevant, state/province where the conduct has effects, or [verify jurisdiction]. The analysis follows the markets, not the parties' headquarters.
• Business sector and footprint — industry, products/services, geographic reach, sales channels. Mark unknowns unknown/not found/not provided/ambiguous.
• Conduct description — what is, was, or will be done. Each conduct item gets its own row, with: who, what, when, where, and (if multi-party) which counterparties.
• Counterparty competitive posture — for each counterparty, the user's view of whether they are a direct competitor, potential competitor, customer, supplier, distributor, or unrelated. Multi-role flags allowed.
• Candidate conduct buckets the user suspects in scope — horizontal collaboration, vertical restraint, information exchange, pricing-related conduct (RPM / MAP / MFN / loyalty), merger or acquisition, monopolization / abuse of dominance / unilateral conduct, trade association or standard-setting, gun-jumping or integration planning, distribution or channel conduct, algorithmic pricing, labor-market conduct (no-poach / wage-fixing), or other. The bucket is a starting point, never a conclusion.
• Urgency posture — planned future conduct (pre-clearance triage), ongoing conduct (compliance triage), past conduct subject to investigation or litigation (defensive triage), or no investigation. User-supplied dates only, all marked [deadline verification required].
• Documents and source anchors — what the user has supplied and the section/page/clause for each extracted fact.