BRG Survey Finds 71% of Competition Lawyers Say Global Antitrust Policies Grew More Fragmented over Past Year

BRG’s inaugural Global Antitrust & Competition Report surveys 155 senior attorneys across 15 countries, mapping a new era of enforcement shaped by expanding priorities and mounting political stakes.

Global antitrust enforcement is diverging along national lines, with 71% of senior competition attorneys reporting that policy became more fragmented across jurisdictions over the past 12 months, according to BRG’s inaugural Global Antitrust & Competition Report. Nearly four in five (78%) also cite cross-border antitrust requirements as a significant or recurring challenge.

The report draws on a survey of 155 senior antitrust and competition attorneys across the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific (APAC) and in-depth interviews with 18 leading lawyers. It also finds that about 60% of respondents expect antitrust enforcement to expand in scope and intensity over the next 12 months.

“Domestic politics and geopolitical considerations increasingly influence the application of competition law across jurisdictions”, said David Parker, a managing director at BRG. “As a result, deal timelines and risk assessments often now have to be built jurisdiction by jurisdiction, from the earliest stage of a transaction.”

Yet the picture is not uniformly adversarial. Even as scrutiny broadens, 70% of respondents said enforcement priorities have increased transaction certainty over the past year—a shift attributed largely to regulators’ renewed willingness to accept remedies rather than challenge deals outright.

Additional key findings:

• Labour and employment-related competition issues named top enforcement priority. Over four in 10 respondents (43%) selected these competition issues as the single most-cited priority for the year ahead, followed by consumer pricing and affordability concerns (40%).
• Remedies have become the dominant intervention. Only 33% of surveyed attorneys said authorities tend to challenge or prohibit transactions rather than rely on remedies; 41% said behavioural remedies such as access conditions and firewalls are now preferred, while 25% said the same of structural remedies such as divestitures.
• How a deal is described now carries real risk. Communications, framing and documentation practices were the most-cited legal risk requiring greater attention, named by 46% of respondents overall and 63% in APAC.
• AI, digital markets and financial services are top industry targets for enforcement. This is true both for the past 12 months and the year ahead, with each sector selected by about one-third of respondents.

“High-tech markets are developing extremely quickly, and authorities are trying new things to catch up”, said Konstantin Ebinger, a managing director at BRG. “The problem is, it’s difficult to put these industries—and the types of deals occurring within them—in a box. More and more, they are shaping the economy as a whole, creating a domino effect on other interconnected sectors”.

The report provides regional snapshots for APAC, Europe, the UK and U.S., as well as practical guidance for dealmakers and their counsel.