COMPETITION LAW

As part of its training, debate and dissemination activities in this area of law, CEFI holds targeted seminars on competition law and runs the Pharmaceutical Law Course.

In the targeted seminars, practical aspects involved in applying competition law to the pharmaceutical sector are reviewed. This is a very useful exercise, for which we usually have expert lawyers and representatives of the Spanish National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC). These courses take place over a morning and are very well attended.

The Pharmaceutical Law Course usually includes a round table on competition, where current competition issues and practices in the pharmaceuticals field are discussed. The course attracts a great deal of interest and is renowned as an insightful meeting point for experts in the sector.

We have excellent collaborators for these training and dissemination activities, including lawyers who are experts in competition law, some of whom participate on the Editorial Board for the journal Comunicaciones en Propiedad Industrial y Derecho de la Competencia.

The journal Comunicaciones en Propiedad Industrial y Derecho de la Competencia focuses on doctrine, jurisprudence and decisions handed down in this area.

The following are some of the issues we devote our studies to: vertical agreements, dominance, market definition, information exchange among competitors and parallel trade, distribution, supply and pricing. These aspects relate to all sectors, but we pay particular attention to those that impact on the pharmaceutical sector. Among them, we highlight the long and fascinating doctrinal and jurisprudential debate on free/dual pricing, the compatibility of pay-for-delay agreements with competition law and the issue of abuse of dominance in the pharmaceutical sector.