Profile details
About Dr. Ilka Oberländer
Ilka's practice covers all aspects of European and German competition law. She has significant experience of complex cross-border transactions, managing multijurisdictional merger control and foreign investment screening before the European Commission and national authorities. She also represents clients in high stakes antitrust investigations and has led the global coordination of parallel leniency applications. Ilka’s practice also focuses on the interface of antitrust and new digital business models.
Ilka has worked in several Freshfields offices, including in the US and Asia, and has spent time in-house with a large industrial corporation. Clients value her calm and pragmatic approach as well as her high energy and determination to drive their projects forward.
She advises clients across all industries with a focus on the automotive, private capital and technology, media and telecoms (TMT) sectors.
A native German speaker, Ilka is also fluent in English and Spanish, and speaks French.
Recent work
- Advising Volkswagen AG in its $2.6 billion co-investment with Ford Motor Co. in Argo AI, an autonomous vehicles company based in the US
- Advising Liberty Global on the sale of its operations in Germany, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic to Vodafone for a total enterprise value of approximately €19bn
- Advising London Stock Exchange Group on its $27bn transformational acquisition of Refinitiv, the global provider of financial market data and infrastructure.
- Advising Hellman & Friedman and Nets Group on their sale of key business units in the digital payments sector.
- Advising two large European media houses on their joint online and print advertising cooperation
Qualifications
- University of Freiburg, Germany (Dr iur)
- Institute of European Studies, Free University of Brussels, Belgium (LLM in European Law and European Competition Law)
- University of Passau / Humboldt University of Berlin (German State Exam in Law)
- Complutense University of Madrid