Anu Lalith-Kumar joins Counterfactual host Julia Potter of Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP to provide insights into her background and role at the Competition Bureau as the first episode of the new “Better Know the Bureau” series.
In this episode of the Counterfactual podcast, we hear from Anu Lalith-Kumar, a Competition Law Officer in the Mergers Directorate and a part of the Mergers Intelligence and Notification Unit (MINU) about her background and role within the Competition Bureau. This is the first episode of the new “Better Know the Bureau” series where we “demystify” the Competition Bureau and better get to know the people that make up the Competition Bureau.
00:29
Hello, and welcome to Counterfactual, the official podcast of the Canadian Bar Association's Competition Law and Foreign Investment Review section. My name is Julia Potter. I'm a partner in the Competition and Foreign Investment Group at Blake, Cassels & Graydon , and I will be your host. This is our first installment of our new Better Know the Bureau series, in which we will be interviewing people within the Competition Bureau to let us get to know them, their background, and their role within the Bureau.
00:55
Today, I will be interviewing Anu Lalith Kumar, a Competition Law Officer in the Mergers Directorate and a part of the Mergers Intelligence and Notification Unit, or MINU, at the Competition Bureau. I'm sure that many of you listening have had the pleasure of directly connecting with Anu before. Hello, Anu. Welcome to the Counterfactual Podcast. Thank you very much for being here today and for sharing your story and experiences at the Bureau with our listeners.
1:23
Anu LK
Hi, Julia. Thanks so much. Happy to be here and chat a little bit about what we do at the Bureau.
01:29
Great. So I guess to start off, are you able to tell us about your career journey and how you got started at the Bureau?
01:35
Anu LK
Sure. Um, so my academic background is in law and economics. I always had the intention of applying to law school,, and hopefully becoming a lawyer but I studied economics in my undergrad and then after that I did a dual degree where I did my master's in economics and got my JD. And so in short, the main reason I wanted to join competition or have a career in competition law and antitrust wasbecause it's one of the onlyareas of law that truly is the intersection of law and economics. And I really liked the idea of um being able to use some of my knowledge and education in economics while still working kind of a more like legal job.
02:29
Anu LK
And so while I was a law student and after law school, I articled and worked in a couple different areas of law, but I ultimately decided after that that I really wanted to give competition law a chance and try and see what that would be like.
02:44
Anu LK
And as you know, the competition bar in Canada is very small or intimate, which is great in one way because I was able to reach out to many different lawyers to just kind of talk about how they got into that space. And if they had any recommendations for me on how I could do the same. And it was a lawyer, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to name drop. If not, please cut this out. But it was a Bill Wu that actually told me about this competition law officer position
03:13
Anu LK
at the Competition Bureau and explained that you know it's a great entry-level position as I just was pretty fresh from getting.. finishing articles and getting called to the bar and might be a good way in. And so after that, I reached out to a few folks at the Bureau, interviewed, and was lucky enough to get a position as a Competition Law Officer. And the rest is history.
03:39
That's great. It does sound like you found a very natural path for your two passions in law and economics. It's hard to find areas that that wed the two so well together. Was there anything in particular that inspired you to pursue this career path?
03:52
Anu LK
I think I had, once I understood a little bit more about the Competition Law Officer position and the work of the Bureau, I was especially interested in joining because it's a very investigative position. And I think in my previous jobs within the public sector or legal aid and things like that, there was a lot of those elements that I really enjoyed. and so that combined with the fact that it involved kind of the subject areas that I especially had an interest in, I was very hopeful that this would be a good fit for me. And I'm still here and I'm really enjoying it. So I'm glad that I was right with that suspicion.
04:38
Yeah, so far so good. And so you're in the you're part of the MINU now, but I understand you've had other roles at the Bureau too. Can you describe those other roles that you've had and maybe your path through the bureau?
04:52
Anu LK
Sure. So I joined as a competition law officer, or like informally, maybe a junior competition law officer in November of 2020. And that was within the Mergers Directorate. And I am still a competition law officer, but at a different level within the Mergers Directorate now. However, two years ago, or almost two years ago, I joined the MINU, which is our Merger Intelligence and Notification Unit. So right now, my responsibilities are kind of.. they're for both. So I do continue to review transactions as many competition law officers do within the mergers directorate, but I also have other responsibilities that I balance with that within the MINU team.
05:35
Very interesting. And so within the MINU, can you describe a typical day of work or what the key responsibilities would be for your role?
05:42
Anu LK
Sure. So yeah it really depends on what's going on, but the MINU tasks are kind of a mixed bag of responsibilities and tasks at its core. So the “N” in MINU, the notification side, any filings that we receive, the MINU team triages them, processes them, and then sends them off to our management for assignment.
06:09
Anu LK
So we help with kind of the practical kind of processing and of the filings that we receive, but we also do a bunch of other things, um including on the notification side, counsel is welcome to reach out to MINU at any time
06:26
Anu LK
to discuss whether or not a transaction that they potentially helped close is notifiable under our provisions. And so we are the ones that take those calls, look at kind of how we've dealt with similar situations, if there have been some similar situations in the past, consult our team, and then get back to counsel on those.
06:53
Anu LK
Apart from that, on the intelligence side, the “I” in MINU, our team is always conducting scans and gathering intelligence information through various resources on the various transactions that are affecting the Canadian economy. So we regularly meet and consider those transactions and whether or not it's in an area we're interested in or if it's something that we should look into more. and that can like can
07:23
Anu LK
kind of follow a series of steps. We would start off maybe finding out if the transaction is notifiable. If it's not, we would do some work. And then in some cases, we decide to do a full like intelligence report or review of those transactions, even if they are not notifiable. Apart from those regular tasks, we also have… are in charge of, I like to call it the kinds of other tasks that involve mergers that is not file review
07:51
Anu LK
tends to fall into MINU's lap. So that can include our annual or biannual stats reporting. Anytime we have kind of international cooperation or interactions with our counterparts and other jurisdictions that are just about merger review or provisions that regard merger review or our amendments, MINU is involved in those and assists with those types of calls and interactions. And then kind of any other questions or complaints that come in, we also assist with resolving or addressing.
08:31
No, it sounds quite interesting. and I'm sure many of our listeners have interacted with you as I've said before, I know that I have with all of our are tricky questions coming in on notification analysis. And so you've touched a bit on how you interact generally in the mergers directorate. How do you interact with other Bureau departments and how often would those interactions occur?
08:50
Anu LK
So I'd say we do interact with other Bureau departments. From a MINU perspective, it happens every now and then, where we might receive complaints or specific types of requests. And once we look at it um and investigate it a little bit, we realize the complainant, it's not really about a merger or a transaction, or it's not within a timeline that we can review. But there might be other conduct, let's say, that could be a reviewable, in which case we would reach out to our counterparts in the Monopolistic Practices Directorate and maybe transfer the complaint over or work with them in tandem to address we would address the merger aspect, they would address the conduct aspect. We also regularly on just file reviews, so as competition officers that are reviewing various proposed transactions, do end up interacting a lot with various parts of
09:47
Anu LK
of the Bureau. So that could include, at certain stages of the review, we might be interacting with economists in our Economics and Analysis Directorate. But we also interact with the practicing lawyers of the Competition Bureau Legal Services under the Department of Justice when conducting our file reviews quite often. In MINU, we also do reach out to our lawyers in the CBLS
10:15
Anu LK
as well to chat about whether it's notification questions or other kinds of questions of completeness of PMNs and if it's like a novel situation or something that's borderline, we sometimes get their advice on how to proceed.
10:32
And so getting a bit more sort of personal to you, what do you find the most fulfilling about your job or on the other hand, what are some of the challenges that you face in your role?
10:41
Anu LK
So for fulfilling, it's easy. The top two for me are the people I work with and the diversity in the work. So the work we do is very collaborative. And in any given day, whether I have my MINU hat on or just my kind of officer review hat on, I'm in many different meetings as are many of my colleagues, because as much as we might have independent responsibility of specific tasks, ultimately, we come together and need to talk about what the next steps are, formulate a plan, and are always keeping our management up to date on what's happening. And I'm very lucky that I really love the place I work in and the people I work with um and enjoy those interactions a lot. And so I'd say for sure the people I work with is one of the most fulfilling parts of the job in the sense of
11:39
Anu LK
I get to be my nerdy self talking about economics and law with a bunch of other people who also care about the same thing. And so I appreciate that. And that also extends to counsel, because like I mentioned earlier, it's an intimate bar. And so we get to see the same faces often and there's definitely a lot of familiarity between MINU at the very least and the private bar. And we get to chat and catch up. That part is also good because once again, one thing all these people have in common is kind of their need to work with economics in law, but I think also a passion for it, at least in most people I interact with. The second would be the diversity in the work. The nature of merger review is that we have no control over what reviews we are assigned um and what industry they may be in. And it's one of the best parts of the job. The fact that we get to learn about so many different industries that
12:38
Anu LK
I previously would have had no idea about. And sometimes they're in areas that are out of my comfort zone, whether they're super technical and niche, or sometimes they're in areas that completely interest me, and I might be a potential consumer of some of the products of the companies that we are reviewing. And even when we review something
13:03
Anu LK
in the same industry for a second time with different companies, no review is ever the same and I very much value that diversity in work since it makes , the workdays and the weeks fly by and there's really nothing more you can ask for.
13:18
Yeah, that's really interesting. So I think from the private practitioner side, I would say the exact same things. It's people, the interactions, whether it be clients or you know the people within the firm or working with the Bureau folks. Like it is a very collaborative and exercise usually. And working with people who have similar interests and are quite interesting can be quite helpful. And also the diversity of the work. I think on our end, it's quite similar. So we're sort of seeing the same files from different viewpoints.
13:45
And so I guess turning to challenges. Are there any challenges that you that you face you want to tell us about?
13:51
Anu LK
I'd say the main challenge, for me at least, are sometimes the tight deadlines and the unpredictability. It's hard to know. There are certain trends of, you know, we're busier with filings certain times of years than others. But realistically, it's hard to know what my schedule will be like a month from now because it really depends on what review am I assigned to and how is it going. So while I'm on a specific file, you can kind of know based on its complexity and if you're going towards a SIR, which is like the Supplementary Information Request period, or not, what maybe your next six weeks are looking like. But
14:35
Anu LK
apart from that, once you're done a review before the next one is assigned to you, you don't have much of a sense of what it will be like. And I don't really mind that. I don't think it's a huge issue. And I think the Bureau does a fantastic job of kind of always checking people's capacity and knowing when they're going to be able to work and not work or have time off and assigning the best way they can with the resources we have. But I think that is something that is unique to this role that when I compare it to people who aren't within mergers and kind of having to adhere to the same types of service standards and deadlines that we have, that is something unique to this role that can be difficult where you don't necessarily know. Like it's not like every August will be slow. It just really depends on what you're reviewing, how it's going and what comes up.
15:28
Yeah, and out of curiosity, what would a typical case file load look like? Are you typically on multiple files or is it usually one at a time or I guess just depends on what's come in?
15:39
Anu LK
It really does depend on what's come in, but I'd say for me, I have balancing MINU with file review. I usually would have one kind of maybe soft-complex to complex file. Non complex can usually get you know done fairly quickly and maybe there's a bit more capacity for that. Other officers, it depends if it's a very complex file that's kind of in the SIR period or they're negotiating a consent agreement, it might be part of a larger review team and there's quite a bit to do and document review and so on and so forth. So they might be only on one or they might be on that plus a non-complex. If it's a couple soft-complex, it depends. It also depends on um
16:23
Anu LK
each file, really. And so we are constantly having conversations about capacity and how much each officer is able to take on and adjusting the workload accordingly.
16:33
Yeah, makes sense. That's, of course, a topic of conversation on the private practice side too. And switching gears a little bit, and I'm sure this is a topic that many of our listeners would be interested in. and How can private practice counsel make your job easier, whether that be in MINU or just on the mergers review side?
16:52
Anu LK
It's a great question. And in hindsight, I thought I wish I had pulled some of my colleagues to get some more tips for everyone out there. But for me, some things that private practice does do that makes our lives easier is providing kind of written notes where possible. And this is especially relevant for the notification questions that MINU receives.
17:17
Anu LK
and I think striking that balance between what is the best use of everyone's time? So is it sending a quick email with the notes? Because we're getting that more and more with some facts saying, “here's a notification question. We think it's come up a million times before, but we just want to run it by you. Here are the facts.” And then sometimes we can get back to them via email really quick and resolve or answer the question that has been posed. In other cases, it's quicker to just have a call that's sometimes less than 15 minutes. And then we jump on the call. We receive the facts after and try to get back to counsel as soon as we can. But I think, it really helps just open communication. So I feel like sometimes counsel is comfortable enough with MINU that they'll reach out and say, “hey, do you have 15 minutes?” And then you realize it's a busy week. People are on vacation. They ultimately say, “you know what, let's just send you an email”, especially when we get heads ups about new transactions.
18:17
Anu LK
Sometimes I respect that, which we really appreciate getting those headsets because as we do our intelligence scans often we end up reaching out to counsel to ask if something's notifiable. So they beat us to the punch when we get those heads ups that a transaction will be announced in the coming week and we will notify.Sometimes that call though involves like the time of multiple partners and senior associates and counsel and there's like eight people from two different firms plus MINU on the call. And other times they'll just send an email with all those people on it, giving us the salient points. So whatever counsel thinks is the best use of time. But we appreciate any efficiencies in that case. And so, if it is something as simple as like the heads up notification, you can send that via email. If we have questions, we'd be happy to send them back by email or then schedule a call if needed.
19:16
Anu LK
And then with notification questions, getting the facts is always very helpful. The other things that I always find helpful from the file review standpoint is if we're ever getting contact information of specific stakeholders, getting that email address…I think most counsel does this. And I also respect that this is really, it's counsel's clients and what information they collect and how easy or hard it is to get that info from them.
19:45
Anu LK
But anytime we get the email addresses, it's so helpful because it's often something I would ask for as a review officer if we don't have it because it makes our outreach so much quicker that we can, you know, initially send an email, then call later and things like that. So I'd say that's like a little very niche thing, but I also appreciate.
20:07
And I guess the flip side of that, if anything to add, is there anything that private practitioners do that make your job more difficult?
20:13
Anu LK
I'd say it's kind of like not doing those things earlier where that makes it easier, but also just overall trying their best to give us as much notice and time is always appreciated.
20:30
Anu LK
While we always know sometimes there's like these last minute requests or urgent requests that come in and it's probably not on counsel and it could be circumstances surrounding the client that's causing that urgency,
20:42
Anu LK
but in file reviews, I've always appreciated when, you know, the service standard, even if it's going to end at a specific date, but something has come up with the clients and they would really appreciate something be completed earlier, the sooner we have that information, the better. And so it doesn't have to be concrete.
21:04
Anu LK
We can work in the gray area if we can hop on a call and you explain that, “oh, it's possible. This will happen sooner and we'd really appreciate it, but we're not sure” whatever it might be. That transparency and trying to give us as much notice and time for any kind of request as possible is always appreciated. Because in some cases we may not be able to meet that request, but we're not going to even have a chance of meeting it if like…
21:33
Anu LK
The later it takes for us to know the kind of unlikelier it is, we can help you out with it, I think. So that would be the main thing.
21:41
Yeah, those are all very helpful tips for our practicing folks going forward. And so in shifting a bit again, what skills and qualities would you say are essential or would be great for someone wanting to succeed in your role?
21:57
Anu LK
So first I would say, teamwork and collaboration. Like I mentioned earlier, we definitely do independent work, but it's rare that, you know, we work independently completely. Even if you're on a review as the only officer, you're very regularly meeting with management, interacting with other team leads that have done reviews in that area. And then, of course, interacting with counsel and people outside of the Bureau, including stakeholders in that industry. It's one of my favorite parts of the job, the market blitz stage, where you get to talk to so many people about the work they do andhow things work in the industry that they're in. But it's got to be something, not that every officer loves the market blitz stage, but it's got to be something that you're at least comfortable with and the ability to
22:53
Anu LK
explain what we do and why we do it in plain language because you might find yourself speaking to super experienced counsel that knows the Competition Act far better than you do, or speaking to somebody that works in an industry that they know really well, but doesn't have a clue what antitrust or competition is. And now you're trying to convince them to give you all this information and explain why they need to do that. The ability to kind of explain what we do in plain language and understand
23:27
Anu LK
the basics I think is very important and be able to work with all kinds of different people with different levels of experience on the subject matter is important. The other kind of important soft skills or skills, practical skills to have are just investigative skills so that can span a lot of things from interviewing, analyzing information. It's not necessarily evidence, but it's that kind of idea. And drafting. Putting together information such that you're constantly providing briefings to different people. And so the ability to distill what would be the important parts
24:10
Anu LK
of this review that management should be aware of versus what's all the other fluff that we can footnote or like let them know of and anticipating what those questions are. But I like to categorize all of that into just investigative skills. So often when people ask me, “oh, I haven't done something like this, how can I apply?” I think there's a lot of transferable skills that many jobs may have that can help with this specific job. And so it's trying to think about yeah, how to use those skills in this context.
24:45
I guess the last question for you is a bit more on the personal side, but what is something about you that people might find surprising?
24:55
Anu LK
I am very short. I am less than five feet. And so I think that's something many people find surprising since most of our interactions are virtual. I joined the Bureau in November 2020. And so every now and then when I do get to meet counsel or even other colleagues of mine that are not in the area that I'm in, in person, I think they're all surprised because I'm generally a loud person and don't stop talking. So maybe that doesn't give off short, short energy. Yeah.
25:28
Yeah, it's funny in the virtual world what you sort of think you know about people and then you meet them in person and it suddenly is quite different. I'm also very short and people are also surprised when they meet me.
25:37
But yeah, it's interesting what changes when you meet people sort of in the 3D world versus just our little squares in our virtual.
25:45
Anu LK
Agreed.
25:46
Okay, great. Well, thank you, Anu. it's been really wonderful speaking with you and getting to know you and hearing more about your role and experiences at the Bureau. I very much appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today. And thank you as well to our listeners for tuning into this episode. Bye, everyone.