Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the premier provider of legal services to technology, life sciences, and growth enterprises worldwide, announced today that Joshua Soven has joined the firm's antitrust practice as a partner in the Washington, D.C., office. Soven previously served in high-level positions at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Most recently, he was a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.
Soven's practice focuses on government antitrust investigations, antitrust litigation, and counseling on antitrust and competition matters. He represents clients before the DOJ Antitrust Division, the FTC, and in federal courts. He also has extensive experience handling antitrust reviews before competition authorities in jurisdictions throughout the world.
In addition to representing leading public and private companies in the technology and life sciences industries, Soven's clients include energy, financial services, healthcare, and retail companies. He has served as lead global antitrust counsel in strategic transactions for leading companies, including AECOM, Avnet, Francisco Partners, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, LinkedIn, Matson, Norbord, Retalix, Southern Power, St. Jude Medical, and Tenet Healthcare. He represented LinkedIn in its $26 billion sale to Microsoft and St. Jude Medical in its $25 billion sale to Abbott Laboratories.
"Josh is an accomplished first-chair attorney who has achieved substantial success, both in private practice and with the DOJ and the FTC," said Doug Clark, the firm's managing partner. "His extraordinary command of antitrust enforcement, process, and policy issues makes him indispensable to clients. Furthermore, Josh's defense and enforcement work, along with his formidable experience in merger and non-merger conduct investigations and related litigation, further fortifies our global antitrust practice. We're excited to welcome Josh to the firm."
Soven served as Chief of the Litigation I Section of the Antitrust Division of the DOJ from 2007 to 2012, prior to entering private practice. In that role, he directed the division's investigations and litigation challenges in the health insurance, consumer products, packaging, beer, and dairy sectors. Soven also handled investigation and negotiation divestiture agreements for a wide variety of transactions. Previously, from 1998-2004, he served as a trial attorney in the DOJ Antitrust Division's Networks and Technology Enforcement Section, where Soven led investigations in the software, electronic payments, and financial services sectors.
From 2004 to 2007, Soven served as attorney advisor to FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras on antitrust investigations in a broad array of industries, including pharmaceuticals, hospitals, media, oil and gas, and semiconductors. While at the FTC, he regularly represented the U.S. at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Competition Network.
Soven is an editor of the American Bar Association's Antitrust Magazine. He has spoken at dozens of conferences on antitrust enforcement issues and has served as a lecturer at Northwestern University'sKellogg School of Management, where he co-taught a course on strategy and competition policy in the healthcare sector. He has also lectured on antitrust issues in China and throughout Europe.
Soven served as a law clerk for the Hon. Robert G. Doumar of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He earned his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1991. He received a B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. He is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia.
Based in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Brussels, the highly regarded antitrust practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati advises clients with respect to mergers and acquisitions, criminal and civil investigations by government agencies, antitrust litigation, and issues involving intellectual property, consumer protection, and privacy. Working with Fortune 100 global enterprises, as well as venture-backed start-up companies, our attorneys have expertise in virtually every significant industry sector, including technology, media, healthcare, services, transportation, and manufacturing. The internationally recognized practice has been involved in several of the most important antitrust matters of the past decade and has obtained favorable antitrust outcomes for clients as diverse as Mylan, Google, Twitter, Live Nation, Netflix, Trulia, Seagate, Nuance, Coca-Cola, Glencore, The McClatchy Company, Brocade, Pixar, Micron, and Autodesk.
About Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
For more than 50 years, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has offered a broad range of services and legal disciplines focused on serving the principal challenges faced by the management and boards of directors of business enterprises. The firm is nationally recognized as a leader in the fields of corporate governance and finance, mergers and acquisitions, private equity, securities litigation, employment law, intellectual property, and antitrust, among many other areas of law. With deep roots in Silicon Valley, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has offices in Austin; Beijing; Boston; Brussels; Hong Kong; Los Angeles; New York; Palo Alto; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; Shanghai; Washington, D.C.; and Wilmington, DE. For more information, please visit www.wsgr.com.
