Significant time savings for competition lawyers with Caselex

Danish law firm Kromann Reumert employs approx. 300 lawyers across offices in Copenhagen, Aarhus and London. It specialises (among other legal fields) in competition law and merger control. The firm subscribes to Caselex - the world’s leading provider of merger control intelligence drawn from the decisions of 58 Competition Authorities over the past 23 years – to allow fee earners to cut time spent on research and provide value elsewhere.

We spoke to Carina Czerwinski Dall, Senior Attorney and Knowledge Ambassador at Kromann Reumert. Carina, who primarily works in the competition law and merger control space, shared how she and her colleagues have found Caselex to be a very valuable tool over the past few years.

How Caselex has condensed days of research into one hour

Carina considers the most significant advantage of Caselex to be the amount of time it has saved the competition team at Kromann Reumert. Comparing the time spent searching for the same merger control case information on competition authority websites, Carina states, “We would spend days finding the same information we can find in one hour with Caselex.”

What makes Caselex such an efficient tool for competition lawyers, and how does it manage to save them so much time?

Carina outlines how the benefits below have improved the efficiency of Kromann Reumert's core processes related to merger control procedures.

• Instant access to the market definitions you need
• A user-friendly interface that simplifies searches
• Global content for when you’re out of options

We would spend days finding the same information we can find in one hour with Caselex.

Instant access to the market definitions you need

Carina explains how the firm “really needed a tool” that provided “an overview of cases with the same market definition, or at least the same area”. Such a tool would help speed up the process of searching for relevant precedents across different platforms.

The competition team at Kromann Reumert found a very effective tool in the solution from Caselex, a comprehensive database of over 63,000 market definitions extracted from more than 20,000 decisions. With Caselex, the team now has immediate access to all relevant precedents in one place, significantly reducing the time spent on legal research.

Carina emphasises how this has made it “a lot easier” for her team “to prepare for client meetings with short deadlines.” Having access to Caselex allows them to quickly obtain market information, which enables them to better serve their clients. Carina's testimonial highlights the value of Caselex in facilitating efficient and effective decision-making in a fast-paced business environment.

A user-friendly interface that simplifies searches

Caselex is a client-centric platform designed to improve the efficiency of key processes for competition lawyers. Its user-friendly interface allows lawyers to quickly find the information they need, navigate market definitions, and access relevant precedents at a much faster pace than relying on public resources.

This is a significant and positive point of differentiation for Carina. In contrast, she observes how the competition authority and commission websites “are not as user friendly”, to the extent that it would take her “days” longer to find the same market definition information she can find in an “hour” using Caselex.

Even with the correct codes, finding the right decisions on the commission website can still take “several hours.” Carina explains that this is due to the need to sift through footnotes to identify relevant previous decisions. Moreover, newer decisions may not be mentioned in the footnotes, making them difficult to find. Caselex solves these issues by providing easy access to both historical and current decisions, significantly reducing the time and effort taken to locate relevant information.

Global content for when you’re out of options

Caselex offers English translations of legal decisions from 58 different jurisdictions, enabling English-speaking lawyers to easily access legal precedents from across the globe. This feature is particularly useful when lawyers are faced with limited legal precedents within their own jurisdiction.

Carina highlights the benefit of Caselex's broad coverage of cases from different jurisdictions. While she primarily uses European Commission cases, she notes that having access to cases from other local jurisdictions can be incredibly helpful:

We've had a case where there was no Danish case law and no case law from the European Commission, but there was a similar French case which we found on Caselex, so that really helped with the market definition - and it also helped us in the discussions with the competition authority on how we could define the market to get the right result.

Carina, a native Danish speaker who is fluent in English, praised the translations, saying they “work really well.” She has “been a part of some of the cases that you [Caselex] have in your merger remedies module, and I have read your English translations” and found them to be “very good.” Carina's feedback highlights the effectiveness of these translations, particularly in technical content.

Conclusion: A must-have tool in the industry

Carina closes by noting that Caselex is widely used among her external peer network and seems to have become a “standard tool” in the industry. She herself uses the platform at least every two weeks, and her associates may “use it for an entire day” when needed. The tool has saved the team hours by quickly providing the necessary results, allowing them to move on with their cases. They “then return to Caselex once again when working on a new case.”