Celebrating Compass Lexecon Women

Compass Lexecon is proud to announce that amongst the 30 senior promotions within Compass Lexecon in 2020, 14 (47%) of these are women. The number of senior women professionals at Compass Lexecon has increased by 21% over the last 5 years, showing a positive movement towards gender parity at all levels within our business.

International Women’s Day on 8 March marked an opportunity this week to celebrate the many exceptional women at Compass Lexecon and highlight their achievements, including numerous awards and accolades, pioneering research, and active engagement in topical public debate.

Compass Lexecon women demonstrate leadership, enterprise and skill that we are all proud of as a firm. We are delighted to profile those of our leading women that have received senior promotions in 2020. We congratulate them on their outstanding achievements!

Senior Promotions - EMEA

Ruxandra Ciupagea - Promoted to Senior Vice President (Madrid)
Ruxandra has over 10 years of experience in economic consulting and has provided expert evidence in litigation and international arbitration matters focused on pricing, valuation and damages assessments in energy and infrastructure markets. Ruxandra was recognized in the Who’s Who Legal Energy 2019 publication for her extensive experience in fields of natural gas and LNG, electric power, and renewable energy. In 2019, Ruxandra co-authored a chapter on the “Principles of damages” in The Investment Treaty Arbitration Review (jointly with Boaz Moselle). She is also teaching at the Brussels School of Competition and Queen Mary University of London.

Patricia Lorenzo - Promoted to Senior Vice President (Madrid)
Patricia has 19 years of experience in applying economic analysis and econometric techniques to competition policy and damages valuation cases. She was listed as a Future Leader in Competition in 2019 by Who’s Who Legal and was also included in the 2019 W@Competition ‘40 in their 40s’ notable competition professionals. She has particular expertise in media broadcasting and intellectual property and has recently provided economic valuation of audiovisual rights and designed fair and efficient tariffs for the remuneration of intellectual property rights. Patricia has also presented on the assessment of market power at recent industry conferences in Spain.

Valérie Meunier - Promoted to Senior Vice President (Brussels)
Valérie has over 12 years of experience advising clients in mergers, antitrust and damages litigation cases across a variety of jurisdictions. Her recent merger cases include Thales/Gemalto, Discovery/Scripps, Safran/Zodiac Aerospace, H3G/Wind Italy. Valérie was included in the 2019 W@Competition ‘40 in their 40s’ notable competition professionals. She has taken part in several competition policy debates, including the review of the competition rules applicable to vertical agreements, and spoken extensively at industry events, including on excessive prices and the Google Shopping Decision. She has also co-authored several articles published in academic journals including The RAND Journal of Economics. Valérie has spoken at many industry events on topics including excessive pricing and the Google shopping decision.

Catalina Campillo - Promoted to Vice President (Brussels)
Catalina’s work focuses on the application of economic analysis and econometric techniques to competition policy cases and damages litigation issues. She has experience in the assessment of the competitive effects of mergers, as well as Article 101 and Article 102 TFUE cases. Catalina has provided expert reports in the context of damages litigation, and has given expert testimony before the Spanish courts in the context of the Trucks proceedings. Catalina has also worked as an Associate Lecturer at Instituto de Empresa Business School and Instituto de Estudios Bursátiles.

Alina Goad - Promoted to Vice President (London)
Alina has over 15 years’ experience in applying competition economics to cases in both the private and public sectors. Prior to joining Compass Lexecon, Alina headed up the Civil Aviation Authority’s Competition Policy team. Here she led the market power assessments at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted and the initial preparation for the widening of the CAA’s competition powers. She was accountable for the delivery of all CAA competition related matters including policy, advice and investigations. Alina has also held roles at Ofcom, the OFT, the CC and LECG. She has extensive experience of merger cases both as a regulator and in advising merging parties. Alina also has experience on both sides of Competition Act cases and market investigations and has particular expertise in the application of competition policy to regulated industries.

Kadambari Prasad - Promoted to Vice President (London)
Kadu has eight years of experience advising in merger control, Article 101 and Article 102 and arbitration cases. She has particular expertise in theoretical modelling and formalizing economic concepts. She has developed theoretical models for leading investigations, including the European Commission’s Pay TV investigation, the European Commission’s Article 102 investigation into Qualcomm, and the European Commission’s Article 101 investigation of the market for credit default swaps. Kadu also has significant expertise in valuation of intellectual property, in particular the valuation of standard-essential patents under terms that are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory. Kadu presented at the Competition Commission of India (CCI) 4th National Conference on Economics of Competition Law in New Delhi on “Antitrust issues in Europe: Developments in Abuse of Dominance – conditional rebates”.

Lotta Väänänen - Promoted to Vice President (Helsinki)
Lotta’s work focuses on the economic analysis of questions in competition policy, pricing, and IPR. With a research background in empirical industrial organization and economics of innovation, her professional experience has centred on the use of data, econometrics, and experiments together with rigorous economic analysis to study complex questions in business and in competition cases alike. At Compass Lexecon, she has played an important role in the development of the Helsinki office and has worked on Finnish cases involving the economic assessment of mergers as well as of pricing practices in various industries. Prior to joining Compass Lexecon, she worked at Sanoma and Nokia Corporations. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from the Aalto School of Economics and her research has been published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, among other journals. Lotta joined a panel at the latest W@Competition Nordic event in Stockholm on: “Vertical agreements – the effects of digitalization on vertical restraints”.

Senior Promotions - U.S.

Erica Benton - Promoted to Executive Vice President (Chicago)
Erica Benton has over 10 years of economic consulting experience.  She specializes in industrial organization, antitrust, intellectual property, class certification, and applied econometrics and has performed analyses in a variety of mergers, private antitrust litigations, and regulatory proceedings. During her time at Compass Lexecon, Erica has analyzed economic issues in wide range of industries such as pharmaceuticals, health care, finance, consumer products, transportation, and manufacturing.

Jennifer Milliron - Promoted to Executive Vice President (Chicago)
Jennifer has 20 years of experience providing advice to clients on litigation and consulting matters involving financial analysis of merger and acquisitions, bankruptcy and solvency disputes, corporate governance, accounting irregularities, forensic accounting, securities fraud and firm valuation and has testified on damages issues. Before joining Compass Lexecon, she was a Vice President at Chicago Partners LLC and was an auditor for KPMG Peat Marwick LLP. She also taught at Washington University as a visiting instructor.

Andria van der Merwe - Promoted to Executive Vice President (Chicago)
Andria has over 10 years of consulting experience, specializing in financial markets, complex derivatives and structured securities, antitrust and class actions. She is a Research Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, and was previously an Adjunct Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she taught graduate-level courses on fixed-income asset pricing and modeling. Andria has recently published ““Bitcoin Fraud Class Action Shows Crypto Litigation Hurdles” published on Law360 in February 2020 and “An Economic Assessment of Risks in Bitcoin as An Alternative Asset Class” in Studies in Applied Finance from Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics in September 2019. She is the holder of three U.S. patents and her research has been published in several internationally renowned journals.

Alice Kaminski - Promoted to Senior Vice President (Chicago)
Alice has been providing economic analysis for over 17 years, with over seven years of experience in economic litigation consulting. She specializes in antitrust and complex damages litigation, and has also worked on intellectual property, credit discrimination, labor, and insider trading engagements. She has provided research and analysis on numerous antitrust matters on behalf of companies and government agencies, in the US and abroad. Alice’s antitrust case work includes mergers, attempted monopolization, tying, and antitrust issues related to intellectual property and standards.

Erin Secatore - Promoted to Senior Vice President (Boston)
Erin came to Compass Lexecon from a large international law firm where she specialized in labor and employment law, spending the majority of her time representing clients in the airline industry on a variety of matters. Her publications include: The Spread of Zika Virus: What U.S. Employers Should Know, New York Law Journal, co-authored with Sloane Ackerman (2016); Violence In The Workplace: What Is An Employer’s Liability?, New York Law Journal, co-authored with Sloane Ackerman (2015); and Avoiding the Technical Knock Out: Tackling the Inadequacies of Youth Concussion Legislation, 58 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 417 (2013) (paper considered in session by Uniform Law Commission, December 2012).

Sophie Yang - Promoted to Senior Vice President (Boston)
Sophie has over 10 years of applying microeconomic theory and econometric methods to complex litigation and merger review settings. Over the course of numerous matters, Dr. Yang has supported testifying experts on alleged monopolization and exclusionary conduct, price fixing, and intellectual property issues. She has performed economic analyses for multiple high-profile mergers. She has given seminars related to intellectual property damages and FRAND licensing issues to judges, government agencies, and IP attorneys at conferences and law firms. Dr. Yang served as a consulting expert for a consortium of investors on economic forecasting and is Adjunct Faculty at Harvard University.

May Huang - Promoted to Vice President (Pasadena)
With over 12 years of experience, May’s litigation consulting experience includes the banking, retail, high-tech and telecommunication industries. She has also worked on studies involving damages estimation, asset valuation, merger and acquisitions, and intellectual property. Prior to joining Compass Lexecon, she was with Charles River Associates in the finance practice, and with Johnson and Johnson as a Senior Financial Analyst.

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