Extract from Chuck Kellner and Kevin Clark”s article “The Comprehensive Guide to Second Requests”
Veterans of the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act Second Request practice know the demands well. Parties to a pending merger often have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars at stake and a closing schedule that drives every decision. The government files a broad request for additional information to complete its antitrust analysis. The parties race the calendar while simultaneously negotiating scope and compliance dates with the reviewing agency.
Top antitrust lawyers understand – patiently or otherwise – that ediscovery takes time. But as data volumes grow, government requests broaden, and deal value accumulates by the day, those same lawyers have every right to ask: is there a better way? The answer, increasingly, is yes.
Modern technology has fundamentally changed what is operationally possible in a Second Request response – compressing timelines that once took weeks into days and giving legal teams analytical capabilities that simply did not exist a decade ago.
