Bona Law PC Adds Veteran Antitrust Attorney and Opens New York Office
January 21, 2021
Bona Law announced this month that a star DLA Piper antitrust attorney joined its ranks and simultaneously launched the firm’s New York office. This addition bolsters the firm’s merger and international antitrust practice.
Steven Levitsky agreed to leave DLA Piper to open and lead Bona Law’s New York office. Levitsky brings three decades of antitrust experience at such top firms as Shea & Gould and LeBoeuf Lamb, where he was in charge of the antitrust M&A groups. He has
- Served Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 company clients, managing the antitrust aspects of complex, large-scale merger transactions, domestic and international joint ventures, and creating antitrust compliance and auditing programs.
- Guided clients through contested mergers in more than 50 industries.
- Supervised at least 10 deals valued at more than $10 billion each. One deal involved his supervising antitrust merger clearances across 75 international jurisdictions.
Levitsky has written three books and more than 80 articles, has been published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, won numerous writing awards, and spoken at numerous international antitrust and FCPA conferences in New York, Chicago, Washington, London, Bermuda, Mumbai, Beijing, and Hong Kong.
Levitsky has also represented clients in major multidistrict antitrust litigation, and was part of the litigation team in FTC v. Steris, one of the very few litigated cases where the FTC lost its attempt to block a merger.
Levitsky joined Bona Law because of the dramatic change he sees in the legal market. “Savvy GCs have learned they can get top quality legal work from smaller, specialized boutique firms with superb talent and personal service and for greater value: they don’t have the massive overhead that drives large firm rates.”
Levitsky was also asked whether he thought that corporations would hire an antitrust boutique for merger clearance work, when the corporate was done by another firm. He said, “I’ve worked on a number of deals where the corporate GC chose different firms to work on different specialty areas of the transaction. Corporate GC’s have the right to choose what firms they want for what purpose. They expect seamless integration. And in all the cases I’ve ever worked on, they got it.”
The CEO of Bona Law said the opening of the New York office is a “huge step toward achieving the firm’s vision of providing greater value and more flexibility for the full range of its clients’ antitrust and competition needs, said Jarod Bona, CEO of Bona Law, adding that the firm “is built on the idea that legal markets are changing in a way that the big law model doesn’t accommodate.”