Biography • Competition

Mark Friend is head of our London antitrust practice and has been a partner since 1990, having qualified as a solicitor in 1982. He read law at Cambridge and obtained a master's in EU law from the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

His practice encompasses all aspects of EU and UK competition law (including antitrust litigation), state aid and the economic regulation of utilities, with a particular focus on energy and water. He has extensive experience of counselling and representing clients on complex mergers and strategic alliances, cartel, dominance and market investigations, at EU and national level, as well as advising public and private sector clients on more general issues of EU law.

Recent merger cases include ASSA ABLOY/Securistyle, Walgreens/Alliance Boots, Berkshire Hathaway/Lubrizol, ASSA ABLOY/Agta Record, Alliance Boots/ANZAG, ASSA ABLOY/Paddock, Oracle/Sun Microsystems, Alliance Boots/Dollond & Aitchison, Co-op/Somerfield, Lloyds/HBOS, Thomson/Reuters and Boots/Alliance UniChem.

He has an unbeaten (3-0) record of winning merger appeals in the Competition Appeal Tribunal and acted for UniChem in the successful High Court defence of an Article 102 challenge by a group of rival wholesalers.

Recent market studies/market investigations include motor insurance, travel money, equity underwriting, PPI, medicines distribution, personal current accounts and Northern Ireland banking.

He has published widely in academic and professional journals. He is the author of a 50,000-word study on the regulatory treatment of electricity mergers in the UK (published by Allen & Overy in 2003) and contributed the chapter on state guarantees to EU State Aids (eds Hancher, Ottervanger and Slot, 2012).

Allen & Overy's antitrust and competition team comprises over 100 specialists located across the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and the United States. We advise corporates and financial institutions on their global antitrust policies, litigation and regulatory strategies and have acted on some of the highest-profile and most complex cases in recent years.