Our antitrust practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions and government investigations, including international antitrust and banking antitrust issues.  The department analyzes transactions to determine whether they raise antitrust issues, develops strategies to address those potential concerns, and represents clients before the U.S. DOJ, the FTC, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, state attorneys general and foreign antitrust enforcement authorities, and in litigation challenging transactions on antitrust grounds.  Since the beginning of 2007, our antitrust group has taken a leading role in virtually all of the mergers and acquisitions in which we have been involved and that are mentioned above, including:  Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch; Alltel's sale to Verizon Wireless; the sale of Rohm and Haas to Dow Chemical; Wells Fargo in its acquisition of Wachovia; Morgan Stanley's capital raising transactions; PNC's acquisition of National City Corporation; ChoicePoint's sale to Reed Elsevier; Hercules' sale to Ashland; JPMorgan Chase's acquisition of Bear Stearns; BEA's sale to Oracle; Atmel in responding to an unsolicited acquisition proposal; Countrywide's sale to Bank of America; Respironics' sale to Royal Philips Electronics; NYSE Euronext's acquisition of the American Stock Exchange; CheckFree's sale to Fiserv; Carlyle's acquisition of Zodiac Marine; and Caremark's sale to CVS.