Accueil
/ Publications
/ Articles
/ Antitrust in 2025: Data Trends and the Impact of Regulatory Shifts

Antitrust in 2025: Data Trends and the Impact of Regulatory Shifts

Global antitrust enforcement is shifting, due to technology advancements, data challenges, economic disruption, recalibrated regulatory strategy and geopolitical change. The evolving landscape presents a complex challenge: how to navigate digital risk, geopolitical pressures and regulatory uncertainty, all while staying deal-ready.

How data is used, shared, preserved and produced to regulatory agencies sits at the center of today’s most pressing challenges. Enforcement agencies rely on data analytics to assess competitive conduct, review impending mergers, assess potential anticompetitive conduct and litigate enforcement actions. As organizations move through this period of change, there are several key factors to prepare for and address across all phases of dealmaking and antitrust compliance activities.

Regulatory Expansion and Enforcement Evolution

Regulatory frameworks are evolving rapidly across a number of jurisdictions, increasing both the complexity and volume of data required during merger reviews. In the United States, amendments to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, confirmed in 2024, significantly expand the scope of initial filing requirements, increasing the burden of data production at the earliest stages of a merger.¹ In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has broadened the Competition and Markets Authority’s enforcement powers, including enhanced document preservation duties and expanded authority during dawn raids.² These shifts require companies to reevaluate their compliance posture, balancing regulatory obligations with operational and strategic risk, underscoring the importance of strong data governance, defensible data workflows, proactive mapping of communication systems and coordinated strategies that can scale across jurisdictions.

Shape Strategy, Drive Success: The Modern General Counsel

More Insights

With merger reviews becoming more data-intensive, organizations are also aligning their responses more closely with deal partners to streamline disclosure formats and timelines.

Merger Review and Data-Centric Deal Scrutiny

As data becomes a driving force behind mergers and acquisitions, regulators are placing greater scrutiny on deals where customer information — not just physical assets or market share — is the key asset. Authorities are increasingly focused on how data-driven market power should be assessed and how customer data might be combined post-merger. This shift has led to novel regulatory remedies, including restrictions on access to sensitive commercial and technical information like pricing, IP and customer records.³

To meet these expectations, companies may be required to implement sophisticated data remediation and segregation plans to address competition concerns related to data sharing and ownership. In private equity-backed transactions and multi-portfolio company deals, agencies may demand cross-portfolio document reviews, amplifying risks and compliance burdens.

Algorithmic Pricing and AI

As algorithmic pricing becomes more widely adopted across digital platforms and traditional industries, competition regulators are sharpening their focus on how these tools may enable collusion or unfair pricing practices.⁴ While pricing algorithms can drive operational efficiencies and dynamic pricing strategies, they also risk facilitating tacit coordination among competitors — particularly when similar data inputs and models are used across an industry. Recent commentary and enforcement trends suggest agencies are increasingly concerned with algorithmic transparency, auditability and accountability. Companies leveraging AI or algorithmic tools should prepare for questions not only about the functionality of these models, but also about the data used to train them and the potential for unintended anticompetitive outcomes.

Class action lawsuits are also leveraging large-scale structured data — from sales figures to user behavior on digital platforms — to support claims of problematic conduct. The integration of AI tools alongside traditional analytics allows for deeper insights into trends like pricing behavior and supply chain anomalies, increasing the evidentiary strength of such claims.

Investigations, Discovery and Document Production

With raid activities increasing across Europe,⁵ organizations must be ready for potential seizures that extend beyond traditional office settings, including virtual and personal devices. This includes preparing IT teams with specialized training, conducting mock dawn raids and establishing processes for handling data on personal devices, as fines for obstructing or deleting information can be substantial, with the European Commission able to impose fines of up to 1% of the total turnover of companies obstructing a dawn raid.⁶

Organizations must also be prepared to engage with enforcement agencies regarding document requests, discussing technical specifications, timelines and the burden of compliance. Legal teams often require expert assistance to clarify how information is stored, exported and prepared for review, particularly when it involves emerging data sources like chat messaging applications. Additionally, competition authorities may request documents from investors, private equity backers or other stakeholders during their investigations.

Litigation, Claims and Post-Enforcement Complexity

Where mass claims litigation follows an enforcement action, organizations are experiencing an increased need for a centralized platform to house claims data. Litigations often span consumer claims and mass claims from other businesses, and a tremendous amount of data is involved in validating, managing and responding to claims. When data is managed proactively, organizations can streamline these processes and help reduce the burden of large-scale, extended litigations.

Final Thoughts

Antitrust enforcement in 2025 is not just about market competition — it’s about data and changing regulatory strategies. Enforcement activity is moving swiftly, with implications for how companies handle data, assess mergers, obtain deal clearance and manage compliance. General counsel and legal teams that remain aware of the disruption across jurisdictions and weigh the impacts of the current environment in their decision making will be better equipped to simultaneously meet the demands of regulatory inquiries and the needs of their business.

Footnotes:

1: “FTC Finalizes Changes to Premerger Notification Form,” Federal Trade Commission (October 10, 2025).

2: “CMA sets out initial plans as new digital markets competition regime comes into force,” GOV.UK (January 7, 2025).

3: “FTI Technology Delivers Vast Data Identification and Remediation Exercise for Multi-National Acquisition in Response to Unprecedented DG Comp Provision,” FTI Consulting (last accessed May 2025).

4: “The Price of Innovation: Are Your Systems Putting You at Risk?” FTI Consulting (April 4, 2025).

5: “Surge in dawn raid activity signals stricter antitrust scrutiny,” A&O Shearman (March 19, 2025).

6: Council Regulation (EC) No 1/2003, 2003 O.J. (L 1) 1 (EC).