The Brattle Group adds Minjae Song as a principal in Washington, DC
The Brattle Group, a global economics, finance, and regulatory consulting firm – has hired Minjae Song as a principal in the firm’s antitrust/competition group. He will be based in Washington, DC.
Song joins Brattle from Bates White Economic Consulting, where he spent the last six-and-half years. He specializes in consulting on competition matters in media, credit cards, consumer packaged goods, semiconductors, and e-commerce. He has provided econometric analyses centered on horizontal mergers, two-sided markets, common ownership, monopolization, and price bundling, and has worked with government agencies and Fortune 500s.
Much of his work in antitrust policy and damages has focused on the pharmaceutical, intellectual property, and high-tech industries.
Some of his notable engagements include being retained as an economic expert by an antitrust authority to analyze the effects of a merger between two media platforms; providing analysis and expert support to the DOJ in regard to the proposed merger of silicon metal producers FerroAtlantico and Globe Specialty Metals; and helping Dr. Oetker analyze the competitive effects of a proposed acquisition of McCain Foods’ North American frozen pizza business. 
"Minjae has outstanding experience directing large projects, particularly involving merger review, and has an established track record of working with regulatory agencies and leading academics," said Renée Duplantis, leader of the antitrust/competition practice at Brattle. "We're thrilled to have him as a new colleague, and clients will value his clear, thoughtful approaches to analyzing complex issues."
Prior to joining the consulting arena, Song spent 11 years in academia, teaching microeconomics and econometrics. Between 2007 and 2014, Song was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester, and between 2003 and 2007, he was an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Song holds an MA and PhD in economics from Harvard University, and a BA in economics from Seoul National University.
"I'm joining Brattle at an exciting time of growth for the competition group," Song said. "I'm looking forward to contributing to Brattle's focus on professional excellence and inclusive company culture."
It’s an interesting time for competition and antitrust policy, with the FTC and a coalition of attorneys general from 48 states and territories last week filing antitrust lawsuits against social media giant Facebook. The suits target Facebook’s alleged anti-competitive activity, which drove it to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp and allowed the company to maintain a monopoly on the social networking market. The FTC notes that Facebook also tried and failed to purchase Twitter and Snapchat.
The FTC previously cleared the $1-billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and the $19-billion acquisition of Snapchat in 2014. Perhaps the agency didn’t quite grasp what social media was six years ago, or maybe it didn’t much care about preventing effective monopolies in the Big Tech space. Whatever the reason, the FTC has made a U-turn on its previously laissez-faire approach to antitrust law, wherein Facebook could snap up promising startups such as Instagram before they ever posed a threat.
