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Competition law Compliance

Why Comply?

Companies which break competition law can be fined up to 10% of group worldwide turnover. European Commission fines are growing ever higher and investigations are costly and disruptive.

Putting in place a competition compliance programme which works to help avoid a breach is a lot less demanding than dealing with a dawn raid or investigation and a lot less expensive.

Competition authorities say that the core of an effective compliance culture is to have an unambiguous commitment to competition law compliance from the top down. You will need to establish a policy for compliance at board level, conduct an audit so the business knows where the risks are, train your workforce and ensure they have a means for checking their understanding, and have a process for evaluating whether the programme is working.

Active and well managed compliance programmes can be hugely beneficial in terms of knowledge sharing, risk assessment and as an outward demonstration of management commitment to the issues. Most of all they can help to establish what the competition authorities want to see within businesses: "a culture of compliance". Competition compliance needs to be part of a company's overall ethical business agenda.

How we can help

We are compliance experts.

Eversheds' training skills are recognised as market leading, and the competition arena is no exception. We pride ourselves on making a complex area of law simple. Our approach is practical and we use interactive case studies and real life scenarios to bring the legal issues to life.

Our expertise in trading issues comes to the fore in auditing your business, identifying the risks and working out what to do about them.

We tailor compliance programmes to clients and their needs and concerns. This can range from written guidelines and face-to-face training programmes, to video and award winning online training. We can offer mock dawn raids and even provide interview skills coaching.

Our aim is to ensure that staff understand how competition law applies to what they do every day at work. This means that our programmes are written in the language of your business people. We can also provide training for in-house legal teams which covers every aspect of the technical application of the law.

We have developed an innovative and award winning online training offering. The Eversheds Competition Law Online Toolkit provides an interactive and visual based learning experience. It uses learning techniques developed in conjunction with educational psychologists. The electronic reporting system allows companies to monitor the efficacy of the programme and provides an audit trail in the event that the company needs to demonstrate its commitment to compliance. Our toolkit is now used in 37 different countries, in 29 languages.

Further Information

For more information about competition law compliance, please contact us: