Dive Brief:

• In-house counsel can expect the Department of Justice to stay aggressive enforcing competition laws against tech giants under President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the agency’s antitrust division, Abigail Slater.
• Slater, who goes by Gail, has been leading the incoming administration’s search for a new Federal Trade Commission chair and will be expected to work in concert with whomever Trump selects for that role. The FTC and DOJ’s antitrust division share responsibility for policing mergers and acquisitions.
• “In her new role, Gail will help ensure that our competition laws are enforced, both vigorously and FAIRLY, with clear rules that facilitate, rather than stifle, the ingenuity of our greatest companies,” Trump said when announcing Slater.

Dive Insight:

The Ireland-born Slater started in law as an antitrust associate at London-based Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. There she worked on the $25 billion Hewlett Packard-Compaq merger in 2001, among other cases, according to the Dublin publication Business Post. 

Her role at Freshfields regularly brought her to the United States and she later took a job at the Federal Trade Commission in the early 1990s. She worked at the agency for a decade and brought cases to block mergers including Whole Foods’ acquisition of its then-closest competitor, organic grocer Wild Oats, the New York Post reported. 

She also worked on a number of tech deals while there, the Business Post reported. Among them was Monster’s 2010 acquisition of job-hunting site HotJobs. She later became an adviser to one of the Democratic commissioners at the time, Julie Brill.

In addition to leading the incoming administration’s search for an FTC chair, Slater is Vice President-elect JD Vance’s domestic policy adviser. She served in the previous Trump administration as a tech adviser on the White House Domestic Policy Council, where she worked on Trump’s executive order on national security concerns over Chinese telecommunications equipment, Reuters reported.

Before joining Vance’s staff she gained private-sector experience as an in-house attorney at Roku and Fox Corp., and served as general counsel at a now-defunct trade group, the Internet Association. 

Deal scrutiny expected

Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration have made antitrust enforcement against tech giants a priority, and Slater is expected to do that, too.

“Gail Slater is a strong candidate to continue that work,” Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, said in a statement. Haworth’s group is a nonprofit supporting tough antitrust actions against technology companies. 

“As we’ve been saying for years, antitrust enforcement is a popular, bipartisan, political winner and here to stay,” Haworth said. 

DOJ has two cases pending against Google, one over the company’s online search dominance and the other over its online advertising dominance. DOJ won the online search case in August but proceedings aren’t finalized yet, and the agency is asking the court to force the company to spin off its Chrome business, among other things, as the appropriate remedy. 

Whether Slater will hold onto that recommendation isn't clear. Although Trump has said he wants to be tough on big tech, he stopped short of calling for Google’s breakup when he was asked about it in October.

“I give [Google] a lot of credit,” Trump said when he was interviewed by Bloomberg News at the Economic Club in Chicago. “They’ve become such a power. How they became a power is, you know, really the discussion. At the same time, it’s a very dangerous thing [breaking up the company] because we want to have great companies — we don’t want China to have these companies. Right now, China is afraid of Google.”   

The other case against Google was heard in court in November and a verdict is expected next year. In its complaint, DOJ says the company has unfairly locked publishers into using its ad sales platform, limited advertiser’s bidding options and used manipulation of its auction mechanics to deprive rivals of scale.

Jim Cramer, the former hedge fund manager who hosts programs on CNBC, said on X that Slater could end up being a big problem for Google. 

“Gail Slater [is] not known as a friend of big tech,” he said in his post. “Not at all ... A Vance advisor, she's tasked with, as president-elect Trump says, stopping tech because it is ‘stifling competition. Not good for Google.’”

DOJ also has a case pending against Apple for making it too hard for people to use software and apps of their choice on the iPhone and iPad.  

In sectors other than technology, particularly oil, natural resources and healthcare, DOJ under Slater could be more forgiving because Trump won’t want to go hard on those sectors, some reports say.

“‘Trump has no problem with Exxon and Chevron merging, but he won’t let Big Tech do anything,’” the Financial Times said in its report on Slater’s nomination, quoting an unnamed Trump adviser. 

Republicans in Congress could also push Slater to go easier on companies if they’re outside the tech sector, The New York Times reported. 

“It is unclear … if Ms. Slater would continue the Biden administration’s aggressive approach to antitrust in other sectors [outside of tech],” the Times report says. “Republicans have criticized actions by Biden’s top antitrust enforcers, who have blocked mergers and broken up monopolies in industries including airlines and pharmaceuticals.”