With a legal career spanning nearly four decades, Cravath, Swaine & Moore partner Christine A. Varney is widely recognized as one of the country’s foremost antitrust experts, indelibly shaping competition law in both government service and private practice. The only person to have served as both the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust and a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, Ms. Varney blazed a trail through the antitrust regulatory field as a driving force in aligning U.S. policy with economic realities. As chair of Cravath’s preeminent antitrust practice, she continues to influence competition law with transformative outcomes that define the commercial landscape across industries. She has led multi-billion dollar transactions and game-changing litigation for clients including Anheuser-Busch InBev, Delta Air Lines, Epic Games, Time Warner and Illumina—during an era in which antitrust concerns dominate regulatory discourse and “more muscular antitrust enforcement is the prevailing trend worldwide.”

As Assistant Attorney General, Ms. Varney headed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division, where she oversaw all aspects of its operations and reformed the government’s approach to merger review to provide greater transparency and predictability. Recognized for having “transformed the antitrust agency,” Ms. Varney rejected what she perceived as an oversimplified approach. Rather than simply blocking deals or ordering divestitures, she used creative solutions—such as behavioral remedies and post-closing monitoring—to capture deal efficiencies while protecting competition. Among other achievements, under her leadership the DOJ revised the Horizontal Merger Guidelines allowing businesses and lawyers to understand how agencies evaluate mergers, and also rewrote the Remedy Guidelines to permit greater flexibility when crafting merger remedies. Ms. Varney presciently recognized the emergence of active competition authorities outside of the United States and played a key role in increasing coordination with international antitrust enforcement agencies. In this effort, she worked closely with OECD and the International Competition Network to achieve enhanced procedural fairness and transparency globally. As companies face an environment in which deals are analyzed in multiple jurisdictions and regulators from different countries coordinate efforts, the effects of this forward-looking strategy continue to be felt today.