Liberius Lawyers

David has been a competition lawyer in private practice in the UK since 2002. He has been Legal Director at DAC Beachcroft, and before that Senior Counsel at Bond Dickinson, including a spell in-house in the Royal Mail competition and regulatory legal team. He has advised on all aspects of competition law (agreements and behaviour of firms, including commercial agreements and the abuse of dominance; merger control, including the new UK and EU security regimes for certain investments; state aid/subsidy control; and competition litigation) at UK and European levels. Clients include:

• Royal Mail (all aspects of competition law and UK/EU regulatory law);
• Heathrow Hub Ltd (competition, regulatory and public law litigation in the UK courts over the proposed third runway at Heathrow Airport);
• International Power (competition law litigation in the EU courts over the wholesale pricing of coal for electricity generation in the UK);
• The British Business Bank (state aid and public investment, and guarantees to banks and other financial intermediaries);
• UK Research and Innovation (competition law and the UK public funding of open access academic journals);
• Jisc (the “Joint Information Systems Committee” for higher education institutions in the UK: merger control advice on three recent UK mergers);
• 288 Group (the UK’s leading collectable coin distributor: advice and litigation concerning abuse of a dominant position);
• J. Silver and others (litigation in the EU courts over EU citizenship and Brexit).

Before qualifying as a lawyer David worked on a variety of international economic, policy and financial questions in the public and private sectors. These included:

• Postings to the UK Permanent Representation in Brussels and the British Embassy in Paris, with responsibilities for economic, financial and monetary matters;
• Work in the Policy Planning Staff and EU departments of the Foreign Office on major European policy questions;
• Serving as policy speechwriter for the UK Foreign Secretary; and for the founding President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development;
• Consultancy work for public affairs clients in London and Brussels on international financial and monetary developments;
• Teaching European law and policy issues at the business school HEC, outside Paris.

David has written extensively on competition and economic subjects, including the following academic books:

• The Organisation of Europe: Developing a Continental Market Order (Routledge, 1995) (“excellent” – Cambridge Journals European Review);
• Competition Law and Financial Services (Routledge, 2014) (“outstanding” – Legal Counsel, European Central Bank);
• Price and Financial Stability: Rethinking Financial Markets (Routledge, 2018);
• Capitalism and the Dark Forces of Time and Ignorance: Economic and Political Expectations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 – extracts translated into French and published by the journal Le Grand Continent in 2021).

He was invited by Legal Counsel at the European Central Bank to contribute the chapter on competition law to the Research Handbook on Hedge Funds, Private Equity and Alternative Investments (Edward Elgar, 2012).

He is also joint author of the competition and economics paper “How To Make Capital Markets Union Work”, forthcoming in 2023 at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels.

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Our quality lies in our people. The Liber.ius team of lawyers brings together a diverse group of bright legal minds all with hands-on experience and high standards of excellence gathered at the largest law firms and corporate legal departments in the country and the world. They are focussed on delivering top notch services and developing valuable long-term client relationship

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