Hamburg antitrust team members author chapters in Lexology's Private Antitrust Litigation 2021

The first chapter gives an overview of the common framework in Europe for antitrust litigation and in particular cartel damages actions. Topics covered are both procedural, including litigation funding, limitation periods and the standard of proof, and substantive, looking at issues such as amounts of damages and the passing-on defence. Where national regimes and practical approaches by national courts diverge, comparisons are made with the position in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, the core European jurisdictions for private antitrust litigation.

Increasingly, an antitrust infringement decision by the European Commission is leading to claims relating to the same infringement being made in several jurisdictions in parallel. In their second chapter, Lukas and Fabian focus on ten of the most common practical issues, faced by both claimants and defendants, in cross-border antitrust litigation cases in Europe. Issues covered range from the strategic, such as the jurisdictions in which to file claims (forum shopping) and coordination of the defence across jurisdictions, to the operational, including evidence gathering and the use of legal tech solutions to handle large volumes of data. 

The two chapters were first published in Lexology Getting the Deal Through’s Private Antitrust Litigation 2021. They are reproduced with the permission of Law Business Research Ltd and can be downloaded below.