Laurence Pritchard

Laurence advises clients on competition law, including merger control and the control of anti-competitive agreements and practices.

Laurence has successfully handled many high profile investigations and inquiries by the European Commission and the Competition and Markets Authority in relation to a wide range of sectors as well as appearing before the specialist competition law court, the Competition Appeal Tribunal, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court on competition law matters. His work includes advice on the Competition Act 1998, the Enterprise Act 2002, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2004, and the Groceries Supply Code of Practice 2009.

Laurence regularly prepares competition law compliance procedures and provides competition law training to clients operating in a wide range of sectors.

Laurence also advises on the National Security & Investment Act regime and its impact on different types of transaction, obtaining clearances where appropriate from the UK Government Investment Security Unit.

Laurence also advises on intellectual property matters and commercial agreements, including distribution, supply, agency and manufacturing agreements.

Specific examples of Laurence's competition law work include:

• advising on the pooling of risks amongst all motor insurers for losses suffered by innocent victims of terrorist acts involving the use of motor vehicles, ensuring that the newly adopted measures to compensate the victims are compliant with competition laws and subsidy control rules.  Laurence attended meetings of the Association of British Insurers to discuss the changes and explain the issues;
• ensuring that the criteria for access to motor insurance databases such as CUE (Claims Underwriting Exchange, a database of motor, home, personal injury and industrial illness reports to insurance companies), MIAFTR (the Motor Insurance Anti-Fraud and Theft Register, now known as Navigate) and askMID (the motor insurance database) are competition law compliant;
• advising trade associations operating in the insurance sector on numerous competition law issues, including providing competition law training;
• successfully challenging on behalf of a provider of insurance services on competition law grounds (abuse of dominance) refusal by the operator of a competent persons scheme under building regulations to grant accreditation for the provider's insurance products under the scheme;
• advising a number of insurers and brokers providing cyber event insurance on ensuring that the establishment and operation by them of a joint scheme for the categorisation and declaration of high impact cyber events for insurance purposes would be competition law compliant;
• advising a number of insurers on their subrogation models for the recovery of repair chargers from the at-faut insurer where they are the non-fault insurer in line with the principles set out by the Court of Appeal in the case of Coles v Hetherton.

Laurence is ranked by the Legal 500 and Chambers directories as a very experienced competition lawyer.