Number of FTC /DOJ HSR Second Requests Per Year

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice's Hart-Scott-Rodino Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2019 is available here. Appendix A to the report lists the number of second requests that each body makes each year. An average of 50 were made between 2010 and 2019, with no significant trend upwards or downwards, and there was an about even split between the two bodies.

The overall number of transactions that result in a second request is relatively low:

The number of transactions (mergers or acquisitions that raise concerns about their impact on competition) reported each year steadily increased over the course of the last decade:

HSR Second Requests Expected to Increase Under Biden

As detailed in a presentation by Driven today, Driven Presents New Trends for Second Request Enforcement in the Biden Administration, the number of Second Requests under the Hart–Scott–Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act is expected to increase in 2021. As discussed in the Tip of the Night for October 19, 2017 , a HSR Second Request may require businesses contemplating a merger to make a quick document production to the Federal Trade Commission so the merger can go forward. Consequently, TAR is often used in these situations to complete document review as quickly as possible. See the Tip of the Night for October 19, 2017.

• Congress is currently contemplating the The Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, S.225, 117th Cong. (Feb. 4, 2021) which will make it easier for the FTC to enforce antitrust laws.

• Last December, Congress increased the budget of the FTC by $20 million, and the budget of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice by $18 million.

• Under the version of the DOJ's Model Timing Agreement, revised in September 2020, the parties may not finalize their transaction until 90 days after they compile with the Second Request, and the Antitrust Division completes its investigation. Previously, the period was 60 days.

• Lina Khan is the new Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. She is well known for criticizing the anticompetitive effects of businesses like Amazon, and is expected to implement a more aggressive anti-monopoly policy under the Biden administration.

• In June 2021, the DOJ filed an action to block the merger of Aon and Willis Tower Watson, two of the country's largest insurance brokers, signaling a start to an aggressive new approach in enforcing antitrust laws.

Jump to Sentences TAR Thinks Make a Document Responsive

Electronic Discovery services provider Fronteo has developed an add-in for Relativity that will help expedite technology assisted review and provide a firmer basis to show that it is actually working. KIBIT Automator highlights individual sentences in a document flagged as being responsive, so a reviewer can easily see which parts of the document the TAR software believes make the document relevant.

Fronteo claims that the speed of the human review necessary for TAR can be more than doubled. KIBIT can also generate heat maps to indicate where documents marked as being non-responsive were coded differently than other documents with a high degree of textual similarity. It performs email threading and uses metadata in its machine learning algorithm.

Fronteo claims that its software can perform email threading on more than 2 million documents within 5 hours.

Email threading is performed on emails which are in Asian languages by making use of systems used in Japan. Fronteo is a Japanese company, so it appears as though this is something it does particularly well.