Consumer Brands CPG Legal Forum 2026

On February 19, Axinn partners Jacklin Chou Lem and Matthew Murphy will speak at the Consumer Brands Association’s CPG Legal Forum, being held February 18-20 in Frisco, Texas. 

Jacklin will speak on the "What’s the Deal with Competition? Getting Real on Deals and Antitrust Intel from DOJ and FTC" panel. This session will cover the deregulatory timeline of the FTC, current commissioner composition, and how the current administration has swung in terms of merger enforcement. Speakers will also cover strategies for merger clearance and battle-tested lessons learned from litigation related to mergers.

Matthew will speak on the “Patents and Trade Secrets” roundtable. This roundtable will examine potential tradeoffs between trade secret and patent protection for products, processes, and other proprietary information. It will further consider the implications of secret sales of goods or public sales of goods made by secret processes, risk mitigation strategies, and current litigation trends and considerations in the patent and trade secret world.