Thought Leaders

Frederick is a professional economist and heads the German operations of the Competition Economists Group. He specialises in competition economics, with a particular focus on damage estimations in both a competition and a commercial litigation context.  He also advises national and international clients on matters relating to abuse of dominance, market power, horizontal and vertical agreements, regulatory issues and on broader dispute matters.

In his commercial litigation work, Fred has acted for both plaintiffs and defendants in over 20 cartel damages cases. He has broad sectoral experience, with specific expertise in the automotive, consumer goods, financial services, retail, telecommunications, and transportation sectors. Case examples including pesticides, aluminium smelters, bathroom fittings, roll-on/roll-off shipping, trucks, German payment cards, sugar, confectionery, polyurethane foam and various car parts. Clients include household names like Deichmann, dm, METRO, Suez, United Airlines, Veolia, Volkswagen or Zentis, but also small agri-businesses and automotive suppliers.

Besides his litigation work, Fred currently represents the alleged ringleader, a major construction company, in Austria’s largest ever cartel probe before the Kartellgericht. Recently he has also advised defendants in the power cables industries in relation to cartel allegations, has advised METRO in its proposed sale of German food retailer Real before the Federal Cartel Office, has quantified joint purchasing benefits for multiple British food retailers, and has assessed competitive links between parties in a shareholder dispute.

He has written widely on competition matters. This includes a chapter in the Handbuch Kartellrechtliche Schadensersatzklagen guide to cartel damages, commentary on recent court decisions, as well as academic and editorial articles.

Fred frequently presents at conferences and external lawyer training courses on topics including typical and untypical defense arguments in cartel and abuse cases, the assessment of unilateral public price announcements, theories of harm in information exchange cases, and the use of economics in assessing damages. He also lectures on competition and litigation matters at English universities.

Fred is included among the most highly regarded German competition economists in the Expert Guides 2020: Competition and Antitrust list. Since 2019 he is repeatedly listed as one of Germany’s “Future Leaders” in the Who’s Who Legal: Competition and Who’s Who Legal: Consulting Experts rankings. He is a member of the Studienvereinigung Kartellrecht, the German Competition Litigation Forum and the German Arbitration Institute.

Frederick holds a Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia, a Master’s degree in Competition and Regulation Economics from Maastricht University and a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Economics from the University of Passau.

He is fluent in German and English.

Dr Frederick R (Rick) Warren-Boulton is a senior managing director at Ankura, based in Washington, DC. He is an internationally recognised economics expert in the fields of antitrust and industrial organisation, particularly in the economics of vertical restraints, mergers, price fixing, exclusion and monopolisation; he has testified and published extensively on these issues. Rick served for six years as chief economist of the antitrust division of the US Department of Justice, first as director of its economic policy office and then as the first deputy assistant attorney general for economic analysis, before co-founding MiCRA, an economic consulting firm specialising in applied microeconomic theory, industrial organization and econometrics, in 1991. He is a former associate professor of economics at Washington University (St Louis), a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a research professor of Psychology at American University.

Rick has served as the testifying expert for private parties and for various government agencies on landmark monopolisation cases such as US v AT&T and US v Microsoft, as well as merger challenges such as FTC v Staples and Office Depot and US v H&R Block.

He has also published and consulted extensively on price-fixing and other restrictive/collusive agreements. At the DOJ, he was a primary author of the US Sentencing Guidelines for criminal antitrust offences such as price-fixing and market allocation, and he has lectured and written on related issues such as optimal fines, penalties and leniency. Since leaving the DOJ, he has provided economic analysis and econometric estimates of harm for private parties negotiating fines and penalties with the DOJ and with antitrust agencies in Canada, the EU, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. He has also been the expert for liability and damages in a number of class action and opt-out cases in the US involving price fixing or market allocation, including for the defendants in recent cases involving air cargo, car carriers, parcel shipping, auto parts and capacitors.