This is welcome news that DOJ is trying to put some limits around how it handles second requests for information in large mergers. The biggest issue in second requests is the sheer number of documents that need to be provided to DOJ. When I ran the process for relying to DOJ's second request in the sale of AT&T Wireless, we ended up turning over 10 million pages of documents - and that was the smallest number provided by the 4 parties (SBC, BellSouth, Cingular, AWE) in the merger. We upended the offices of dozens of employees, and for a two-month stretch commandeered a large conference room and filled it with scanners that busily hummed away night and day collecting the documents. I doubt that the mountains of documents dumped on DOJ's door during that process could possibly have been reviewed in any meaningful way, rendering the document portion of the second request more of a costly compliance exercise than anything else.
It's unfortunate, because DOJ has an important job to do in reviewing mergers, but the tools it wields are the blunt instruments of litigation. Any merger of substantial size is going to be subjected to a second request, and thus put through the time and expense of a paper response that must follow the broad rules of discovery in litigation but that is unlikely to be useful in most cases. I suspect that DOJ's economic analyses and the parties' responses to interrogatories (and perhaps certain electronic discovery) are far more determinative to DOJ's decisions on blocking mergers and negotiating consent decrees than any documents provided. Ideally, DOJ would find a way to limit or stage document production while finding ways to more closely hone in on the critical review issues in each merger. Anything that moved this process away from the binary intractability of litigation - at least in all but the most extreme cases - would be welcome indeed.
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