“It’s very timely to launch this in Europe,” said Stefan Sagebro, a competition and industrial policy expert at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. “It’s good to have this big yearly summit in this area, because competition rules are so relevant in many areas and have a very high political relevance as well.”
While unofficially pitching itself as a “European ABA,” the door isn’t shut to America or to the conversation between the continents. Former DoJ antitrust chief Slater will be onstage in Brussels to discuss “transatlantic bridges” after her grim departure earlier this year amid a lobbying scandal involving a Trump ally.
Renata Hesse, who chairs the American Bar Association’s antitrust section, will also attend. The ABA has defended its values vigorously since Trump returned to office in Jan. 2025, emphasizing diversity and inclusion; the group ended up suing the Trump administration for intimidating lawyers through targeted executive orders.
Ribera said the forum won’t need to borrow a brand as it will rapidly establish its own identity. “The value of a forum like this is not that it mirrors any existing model,” she said, but that it helps maintain a dialogue between the world’s two largest economies.
“Keeping the conversation open does not mean that we will always agree,” said Ribera. “But dialogue helps build understanding, reduces uncertainty and strengthens cooperation where our objectives align.”
Ultimately, lawyers won’t be abandoning the original ABA meeting: With the lion’s share of business still coming from across the Atlantic, most antitrust shops in Brussels are either American or have integrated with their U.S. peers.
But in a world where agencies in the U.S., the EU and the U.K. can coordinate on major transactions in real time, law firms need to offer “a single transatlantic platform,” said Stephen Whitfield, a partner at Winston Taylor — a law firm itself born of a transatlantic merger this month.