Peggy Zwisler Honored with Prestigious GCR Lifetime Achievement Award

For her 45-year long career as one of the world’s most renowned antitrust litigators, Washington, D.C. retired partner Peggy Zwisler received the prestigious Lifetime Achievement award from Global Competition Review (GCR). Chosen for the honor by GCR editors as well as her peers within the international antitrust community, Zwisler was celebrated for her unmatched track record of professional and personal achievements – which include rising to become one of the most respected and formidable antitrust trial lawyers all while being steadfastly dedicated to raising her four children in an era when mothers in the professional workforce were a rarity.

Longtime colleague and friend Al Pfeiffer introduced Zwisler during the awards ceremony, praising her unique combination of deep antitrust knowledge and warm-hearted humanity that often found her educating judges on the particulars of complex competition law while making parallels to her life as a mom to help juries understand her client’s story. Pfeiffer commented, “Peggy is a rare soul who is both an antitrust expert and a truly outstanding trial lawyer. She is also an active and committed mentor to young lawyers. Many who are now partners got their first experience in court because Peggy advocated fiercely for them.” He added, “she’s equally generous to her peers, willing to brainstorm thorny legal problems and strategize on how to present tricky legal issues to judges, juries, and clients.”

In her acceptance speech, Zwisler remarked on how the antitrust world has evolved and how her path to becoming a competition litigator was more happy accident than planned. Though she initially intended to become a college professor, fate brought her into the legal secretary world, a role that served as a stepping stone to paralegal work. Bitten with the courtroom bug, Zwisler went to law school and graduated in a class that was 10% women before starting at a boutique antitrust firm with the sole focus of becoming a trial lawyer. Zwisler explained, “Though I never took antitrust or economics classes in college, I was hooked and determined to figure out competition law on my own. It turned out to be exactly what I wanted to do. Antitrust law is the heart and soul of how businesses work, a critical consideration on how companies make, distribute and sell their product.” She closed by embodying the passionate mentor role so many have praised her for: “As I look back on my career, I hope all you antitrust lawyers enjoy our field and get as much out of it as I did.” 

Latham earned several additional GCR Awards as part of the publication’s tenth annual celebration of the antitrust world’s most cutting-edge matters and elite individual practitioners. Partner Dan Wall was named Lawyer of the Year by GCR and the antitrust community, for a 2019 spent working on “precedent-setting matters.” A cross-border team representing Facebook before Germany’s highest courts also took home the GCR Award for Behavioural Matter of the Year – Europe. 

Multiple Latham teams and individuals were honored as GCR Award Finalists in the following categories:

• Merger Control Matter of the Year: Europe, “Novelis/Aleris”
• Litigation of the Year: Non-cartel Defence, “PNE Energy Supply v Eversource Energy”
• Matter of the Year, “Facebook appeal against the Bundeskartellamt”
• Dealmaker of the Year: Amanda Reeves, partner and Global Chair of Latham’s antitrust practice
• Lawyer of the Year, Under 40: associate Jan Höft