David Cardwell is the Partner-in-Charge of Baker Botts' Brussels office and a member of the firm's Antitrust and Competition Practice. His practice covers the full gamut of EU and UK competition law matters, and regularly sees him guiding clients on some of the most complex cross-border merger control, FDI and FSR transactional matters in the market. Recent years have seen David bring clients through complicated regulatory reviews to some extraordinary outcomes: an unconditional Phase II merger clearance from the European Commission, following a previous merger block by the Commission of the same proposed combination; a "fix-it-first" Phase I remedy approval secured in record time; successful obtainment of multiple EUMR derogations to allow a clients' urgent acquisition of strategically critical European assets.
Engagement with the European Commission and UK CMA goes alongside David's coordination of work with the likes of SAMR (China), Competition Bureau (Canada), ACCC (Australia), CADE (Brazil), COFECE (Mexico), Competition Commission (South Africa) and many others.
Hand-in-hand with his merger control practice, David leads on foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign subsidies (FSR) engagement for clients, continually securing rapid, clean, pragmatic outcomes for clients determined to execute complex cross-border transactions with as much efficiency as possible.
While David is also co-chair of the firm's Antitrust Consumer Product working group, the experience that David has gained has been from a range of industry areas: media and telecoms, sports and entertainment, energy and oilfield services, heavy industrial, chemicals, etc. His time working on secondment as senior antitrust counsel for a global oil and gas major has given him first-hand insight into the priorities and needs of business leads and in-house legal teams alike.
David covers all nature of behavioural and other antitrust matters, having represented clients on major European Commission cartel investigations and regularly advising clients on abuse of dominance matters as well as regular day-to-day antitrust counseling.
*Prior to joining Baker Botts
Listed in Lexology: Competition "Future Leaders - Partners and Global Elite Thought Leaders - Under 45 - Partners," 2026
Recommended by The Legal 500 EMEA, 2019 & 2020
Listed in Who's Who Legal: Competition "Future Leaders," 2017 & 2018