St. Louis

On December 4, 2024, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) released its enforcement results for Fiscal Year 2024 (“FY 2024”), showcasing record awards of monetary relief totaling more than $17.2 billion.The historic awards reflect the agency’s continued pursuit of misconduct charged in enforcement actions filed in FY 2023 in the digital asset space along with enforcement actions against traditional financial services firms and commodity trading houses. The CFTC’s FY 2024 robust enforcement efforts featured a focus on intermediaries, emphasizing the importance of proper registration and compliance by entities facilitating derivative transactions. Enforcement against repeat offenders intensified, reflecting a strategy of escalating penalties to deter recidivism and safeguard market integrity. Additionally, the agency expanded its attention to environmental fraud, bringing its first enforcement cases involving fraud in the voluntary carbon markets.

Both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division have focused their sights on big technology companies. Understanding the precedents set by these suits is critical for clients operating in today’s online marketplaces, both to avoid the risk of antitrust investigations or litigation, and to understand whether a client has been harmed by potentially unlawful conduct.  A September 30, 2024 decision by Judge Chun in the Western District of Washington in the FTC v. Amazon.com case—unsealed to the public on October 7, 2024—demonstrates the increasing breadth of the agencies’ antitrust theories and the wide impacts of Amazon’s sprawling pricing algorithms.*

Last week, the National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel Jennifer A. Abruzzo (the “GC”) announced her position that “stay-or-pay” provisions in employment agreements are unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act (the “NLRA”). The GC also reiterated and built on an earlier memo in which she took the position that almost all non-competes are similarly unlawful under the NLRA because they infringe on “Section 7” rights (which include the right to union and engage in other “protected concerted activity”). Employers—even if “non-union”—should consider the following questions.

On October 10, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”), with the concurrence of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, (the “DOJ”, and together, the “Agencies”) voted unanimously to adopt new premerger notification rules (the “Final Rule”) that implement the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended (the “HSR Act”). The Agencies had previously announced proposed amendments on June 27, 2023, which we covered in a previous insight. The Final Rule reflects numerous changes made during a lengthy review and comment period, including a thorough revamping of the Premerger Notification and Report Form (the “New Form”) that parties are each required to complete if their transaction is reportable under the HSR Act.