Legal News

Delta?s Antitrust Man Flying Different Course in 2008

By Ashby Jones

Washington-based WSJ colleague Evan Perez kindly sent along this nice inside-the-Beltway antitrust-n-airlines nugget:

As the airline industry’s mating season is set to begin with a possible Delta Air Lines-Northwest Airlines link-up, one Washington antitrust lawyer could be the unusual position of arguing the merits of a position he spent lots of time trying to debunk.

K&L Gates’s James Weiss (pictured) was Delta’s lead antitrust counsel during the airline’s successful battle last year to kill an unsolicited merger proposal from US Airways. Now, as Delta appears close to proposing a merger with Northwest, Weiss is doing his homework to shore up this year’s merger proposal.

Last year, he faced off against U.S. Airways’ counsel, Rick Rule, then of Fried Frank and now at Cadwalader. At the time, Weiss argued that a merger between U.S. Airways and Delta would pose some serious antitrust troubles. His team helped produce charts and data showing route overlaps between the carriers, charts Delta deployed to win support for the airline’s plan to remain a stand-alone carrier.

Oh, what a difference a year makes. Weiss, former chief of the Transportation, Energy & Agriculture Section at the Justice Department’s antitrust division, declined to comment, given his work with Delta.

But it’s fairly clear this time around, Weiss will be working the other side of the fence. Delta has new management that wants a merger.

Oddly enough, Weiss could come out on the winning side, once again. According to today’s WSJ, Northwest’s route map differs from that of US Airways, and therefore likely presents a less-troubling set of potential overlaps with Delta. (Delta has a big market share in the Southeastern U.S., in New York, and on trans-Atlantic routes. Northwest is strong in the upper Midwest and on trans-Pacific routes.) The WSJ writes that the DOJ “has been kind in the past to deals like this one that don’t involve a lot of overlap.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).