Chillin'Competition

We’ve returned from our holidays with recharged batteries and with plenty of new ambitious and perhaps unfeasible projects that we’ll be disclosing here in due course.

One of our blog-related aims for the coming months is to boost one of the most characteristic market failures in legal markets: not to much competition, but rather too many competititons.

We observe with interest that in our little antitrust world there are almost more prizes, awards and rankings as there are antitrust law specialists. To be sure, we’ve also contributed to this by creating the Worst-Antitrust development Prize and our Antitrust Oscars, but there are many more: just think of Concurrence’s new Writing Awards, of the Jacques Lassier Prize; of the many law firm directories ranking firms and lawyers such as Chambers, The Legal 500, Best Lawyers, IFLR,  Global Competition Review’s Annual Awards, or in GCR’s well-known and recently-published 40 under 40 – by the way, don’t you also get the impression that some people must have lied about their age?  😉 -.

The problem with some of these sometimes pricey prizes is that they are inherently subjective. Whereas most of us admit that absolute neutrality and objectivity are unrealistic aspirations (a dozen recent complainants before the European Commission seem to think differently), some things in life can still be measured objectively.  That’s why we at Chillin’ Competition have decided to create the first objective legal competition:  we’re creating the “Fastest Antitrust Expert” Award.

The news of the Spanish professor who got sued because of an antitrust-related story that he wrote on his blog led us to question our way or life. “Should we run marathons instead of blogs“, we thought. This profound thought led both Nicolas and myself to register to run the Brussels 20 k on May 27th. 

In the context of a mutually encouraging exchange of  emails (which in essence consisted of Nicolas saying that my two previous running times reveal that I’m slow and of me responding that he’s short-legged) we came up with the idea of opening our challenge to all readers of this blog. These are the rules:

• The “Fastest Antitrust Expert” Award is open to all readers of Chilling Competition: public officials, lawyers, academics, students and, basically, to anyone who has registered for the 20k and who registers on the blog.
• Registering yourself with us is easy: you can either send us an email or write your name in a comment to this post; you must however do that before 1 May.
• On 2 May we will publish the list of names of those of our readers who are taking part in the 20k;
• In the weeks before the race we will be organizing some more stuff open to all participants (I have in mind something like Nicolas cooking pasta for everyone the night before the race…).
• The Prize: the winner will get an special interview at “The Friday Slot” as well as a pair of Li-ning running shoes.