Talking to a competitor at a conference

Regulatory-affairs conferences put you next to your direct competitors constantly, on purpose — the whole value of the room is a shared professional community large enough to include the people you compete against every other day of the year. Almost all of that proximity is fine, useful, and exactly what the event is for. A small, specific set of topics isn’t — not because conversation with a competitor is inherently risky, but because a handful of subjects cross from professional courtesy into a real legal problem the moment they come up, however casually. Knowing the short list is the whole skill.

Most of it is exactly what the room is for

Trade shows and professional societies exist partly because the shared community is worth more than the competitive tension costs — a shared vocabulary for a regulatory change, a read on how a new guidance is landing across the field, even just knowing your counterpart at a competing company by name before a joint submission or a public hearing puts you on opposite sides of the room. None of that needs guarding. The discipline this essay is about applies to a narrow set of topics, not to the conversation itself.

The short list that’s never a hallway conversation

A small number of subjects move a normal conversation into genuinely risky territory the moment they come up, regardless of tone or intent: current or planned pricing, discounts, or list prices; the specific terms offered to a shared customer; who serves which customer or territory; and current or planned production capacity or output. These aren’t niche legal technicalities — they’re the handful of topics where two competitors comparing notes, even in passing, can look like coordination after the fact, whatever either side actually intended. If a conversation drifts toward one of them, the reliable move is a plain redirect (“that’s not something I can get into”) or simply stepping away — not politely finishing the sentence because it feels rude to interrupt.

This is general awareness, not a legal opinion

What counts as risky, and how strictly it’s enforced, depends on your company, your industry, and the jurisdiction the conversation happens in — none of which this essay can know. Most companies with any real competitive exposure already have a competition or antitrust policy that covers exactly this scenario; the useful moment to read it is before a dense, competitor-heavy week like a major trade show, not mid-conversation when you’re trying to remember the rule. If your company hasn’t given you anything specific, the short list above is a reasonable default, not a substitute for asking.

What the formal version already looks like

Trade-association committee meetings usually open with someone reading a short antitrust statement aloud before the agenda starts — a reminder that the same handful of topics are off the table for the room, stated out loud so nobody can claim they didn’t know. It’s worth treating the informal version — the coffee line, the expo aisle, the conversation that starts with a shared complaint about a new guidance document — with the same discipline the formal meeting insists on, even though nobody is going to read you the statement first. At an exhibition-scale event like CPHI Milan or a broad industry-wide gathering like the BIO International Convention, you may have a dozen of these conversations in a single day; the discipline is worth having ready before the first one starts.