Legal Times: How did the firm come to be involved with the Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger?
Paul Friedman: When Whole Foods and Wild Oats were working their way through the FTC, we weren't representing anybody. We were on the outside looking in and thinking to ourselves, "We want to be in that case." We really know food industries. We have Jim Fishkin, who spent more than a dozen years at the FTC and he really was a mainstay of the FTC's supermarket merger enforcement program. He wrote the book. Paul Denis, who is here, was one of the principal draft persons of the horizontal merger guidelines. He understood the rules that the agency would apply. There were four or five of us who got together in a conference room and started brainstorming about how we would win this case if we had a role to play in it. In the back and forth, we developed a theme. It was on one piece of paper — how do we win? — five points.
