NEW YORK – LAWFUEL – US Business and Antitrust Law – Veronica Kayne of the Haynes and Boone, LLP Washington, D.C. office will address the Practising Law Institute’s 46th Annual Advanced Antitrust Seminar Feb. 1 on a potential U.S. Supreme Court ruling that could overturn more than 100 years of antitrust legal precedent.
Ms. Kayne will lead off the event at 9:15 a.m. inside the PLI New York Center with her speech, “Vertical Restraints: Resale Price Maintenance, and Territorial and Customer Restraints.” In it, she will highlight how an anticipated high court ruling would alter the way corporations use Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) in setting the costs for goods and services on the open market.
“Every firm that uses devices like Unilateral Pricing Policies, Minimum Advertised Pricing Policies, or Manufacturer’s Suggested Resale Prices to avoid antitrust liability for RPM will want to re-think its pricing policies in light of its own goals, how its distribution chain is likely to react, what competitors are likely to do, and the new legal environment,” says Ms. Kayne, former assistant director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition.
RPM is the practice whereby a manufacturer and its distributors agree that the latter will sell the former’s product at certain prices (Resale Price Maintenance), at or above a price floor (Minimum Resale Price Maintenance), or at or below a price ceiling (Maximum Resale Price Maintenance).
These rules prevent resellers from competing too fiercely on price and thus driving down profits. Some argue that the manufacturer may do this because it wishes to keep resellers profitable, and thus keeping the manufacturer profitable. Others contend that minimum resale price maintenance, for instance, overcomes a failure in the market for distributional services by ensuring that distributors who invest in promoting the manufacturer’s product are able to recoup the additional costs of such promotion in the price they charge consumers.
Some manufacturers also defend RPM by saying it ensures fair returns, both for manufacturer and reseller and that governments do not have right to interfere with freedom to make contracts without good reason.
Registration for the two-day, CLE-approved event is available at the PLI web site.
Haynes and Boone, LLP is an international corporate law firm with offices in Texas, New York, Washington, D.C., Mexico City and Moscow, providing a full spectrum of legal services. With more than 450 attorneys, Haynes and Boone is ranked among the largest law firms in the nation by The National Law Journal. The firm has been recognized by Vault.com as one of the “20 Best Law Firms to Work For,” by Corporate Board Member Magazine as one of the “Best Corporate Law Firms in America,” and has received the Minority Corporate Counsel Association’s Thomas L. Sager Award for its commitment to diversity.
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