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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

RAISE SUSPICION - Here we go again… or do we? Recruiters and industry observers told Law.com's Andrew Maloney and Jessie Yount that, while some of the elite firms that typically compete at the top of the market are likely to raise associate salaries after Milbank increased its pay scale Tuesday, there's more reluctance in the market this year for wholesale market matching. Law firm management consultant Kent Zimmermann said "history suggests at least one more firm will match, and that'll cause others, and it'll domino across the industry." But, he added, the market fundamentals today, including the state of client demand and associate supply, "don't suggest to most firms that they need to raise compensation in the absence of other firms raising compensation."

MERGE WITH CAUTION - Tech companies looking to tie the knot with competitors would do well to send out their invitations to federal regulators as early in the engagement as possible. The FTC has been aggressively pursuing enforcement actions to rein in tech giants, specifically to block mergers it views as anticompetitive. As Law.com's Heather Nevitt writes in this week's Barometer newsletter, these issues are coming to the fore partly because of draft merger guidelines the DOJ and FTC rolled out in July that may deem more companies to have dominant market positions. The result of this hyper-aggressive enforcement is that legal departments need to be proactive and super-responsive to investigators who take an interest in their merger plans.

ON THE RADAR - Megan Stacy of Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani has entered an appearance for Generac Holdings, a manufacturer of backup power generators, in a pending consumer class action related to a defect in Generac's portable generator products. The action, filed Sept. 22 in North Carolina Eastern District Court by Poulin Willey Anastopoulo, contends that the generators fail to vent adequately and pose fire and burn hazards. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Louise Wood Flanagan, is 7:23-cv-01329, Juliano v. Generac Holdings Inc. Stay up on the latest state and federal litigation, as well as the latest corporate deals, with Law.com Radar 


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