Biography • Competition

Elaine Johnston is the head of the firm's United States antitrust practice and serves on the firm's global antitrust steering committee. She has a broad practice covering antitrust litigation, mergers and acquisitions, and antitrust counselling. She is experienced in a wide range of industries, including banking and financial services, engineering, energy, oil and gas, other natural resources, chemicals, insurance, telecommunications, defence electronics, cable, advertising, paper, health care, leisure and retail sales, agricultural products, shipping and vitamins.

Elaine has an active practice before the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) representing merging parties in connection with mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures, as well as companies in non-merger investigations. She is experienced in coordinating US, European and other foreign antitrust clearances on complex cross-border deals. She has handled deals for ABB, Agfa-Gevaert, Computershare, Deutsche Bank, Experian, First American, Metso, Mubadala, Nortel Networks, Raytheon, Saudi Aramco, Thomson Reuters, Tyco, Visa International and Volvo, among others. Elaine has an active antitrust litigation practice and represented Experian and Saudi Aramco in recent cases. In addition, she regularly advises companies on business conduct, including worldwide distribution and licensing arrangements, patent pools, information exchanges and benchmarking; and represents companies facing conduct investigations by US government antitrust authorities and parallel proceedings in other jurisdictions.

Her recent experience includes advising: Mubadala Development Company on antitrust issues relating to its joint acquisition of EMI Group's music publishing businesses (as part of the Sony consortium) for a combined $2.2 billion, which was investigated and cleared by the FTC; Computershare Limited on its $550 million acquisition of the Shareowner Services Business of the Bank of New York Mellon, a combination of two major competitors which was investigated and cleared by the DoJ; and Nortel Networks on antitrust issues relating to the sale of its patent portfolio at auction for $4.5 billion.

Prior to joining Allen & Overy, Elaine was a partner in the New York office of a major New York-based international law firm, where she was executive partner for diversity, and was a founding member of that firm's women's network committee.

Elaine is a member of the American Bar Association (antitrust section) and the New York State Bar Association (executive committee, antitrust law section). She is also a member of the editorial board of the ABA's Competition Laws Outside the United States, a former associate editor of the Antitrust Law Journal and a former member of the antitrust and trade regulation committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. She is a frequent speaker at antitrust conferences and seminars.

Elaine served on the board of inMotion, Inc, a non-profit organisation that provides legal services to low-income women in New York City, for seven years, including four years as treasurer.

Elaine received her LLM from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and her BA (Hons) and MA from Clare College, Cambridge University, UK.

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.