Antitrust

One sentence can become an antitrust case.

"Let us agree not to hire from each other." The moment that is written between two competitors, the agreement exists. VerbaPulse flags no-poach, wage-fixing, and price-alignment language before the email sends.

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The problem

The agreement is the message

Competition law treats certain agreements between competitors as serious infringements: no-poach pacts, wage-fixing, price-fixing and price alignment, market or customer allocation, and the exchange of commercially sensitive information. The exposure is real and large. Authorities have issued fines in the hundreds of millions of euros for cartel conduct, including a EUR 329 million fine in a labour-market no-poach case.

What makes this a communication problem is how the agreement forms. It is rarely a signed contract. It is a casual line to a counterpart at another firm: let us not poach each other, let us keep fees aligned, let us not compete for these clients. The participants' own emails and chats become the evidence. The cheapest place to stop it is before the line is sent.

What it catches

The line that forms the agreement

VerbaPulse reads the draft as it forms and flags the span that creates antitrust exposure, with a plain reason. Real output from the product:

VerbaPulse Critical

"Let us agree not to hire from each other's teams going forward."

No-poach or wage-fixing agreement

Remove this agreement before sendRemove

For an agreement that forms the infringement, the safe move is removal. VerbaPulse marks the exact span while the message is still a draft.

The same check covers the related patterns:

No-poach and non-solicitation pacts ("agree not to hire from each other").
Wage-fixing and benefit alignment between competing employers.
Price-fixing or fee alignment ("keep our fees at the same level so neither of us undercuts").
Market, customer, or territory allocation ("you take these clients, we take those").
Exchange of commercially sensitive information with a competitor.
Your own rules: upload your competition policy and VerbaPulse enforces it on every draft.

How it works

In the inbox your team already uses

Install in minutes

The Outlook add-in deploys org-wide through the Microsoft 365 admin center, and the Chrome extension covers Gmail. No new tab, no change to how the team works.

Write as usual

As the message forms, a competition-risk span is flagged at the right severity with a plain reason, so the writer sees the agreement in the line they just wrote.

Catch it before it sends

The risky line is removed while the message is still a draft. Anonymized events feed an audit trail your compliance team can show.

Where this fits

A writing-time control, not legal advice

VerbaPulse does not run your competition compliance programme, your training, or your legal review, and nothing here is legal advice. It sits at the one point those do not cover: the outbound message, where a casual line becomes the agreement. It is one control inside email compliance for financial services, and it complements the policy and training you already have.

Email content is never stored: drafts are analyzed in memory and discarded immediately.
Nothing is used to train AI models.
The audit trail is anonymized by design: risk types, severities, and outcomes, never message text or named individuals.
It tells the difference between proposing an agreement and describing the rule, so a competition training email does not get flagged as a cartel.

Our language risk benchmark includes a real, anonymized no-poach case run through the product, with what it flagged.

FAQ

Common questions

What kind of email language creates antitrust risk?

Agreements between competitors that restrict competition: no-poach (agreeing not to hire each other's staff), wage-fixing, price-fixing or price alignment, market or customer allocation, and exchanging commercially sensitive information. These are serious infringements of competition law in the EU, the UK, and the US, and the agreement can be formed by a single casual line in an email or chat. This page describes language risk and is not legal advice.

How does VerbaPulse help?

It flags the language that forms the agreement as it is written. For example, "Let us agree not to hire from each other's teams" is flagged as a no-poach or wage-fixing agreement at critical severity, and marked for removal before the message sends.

How big can the exposure be?

Significant. Competition authorities have issued fines in the hundreds of millions of euros for cartel conduct, including a EUR 329 million fine in a labour-market no-poach case. The evidence is often the participants' own messages, which is exactly the kind of line VerbaPulse catches before it is sent.

Is email content stored anywhere?

No. Drafts are analyzed in memory and discarded immediately. They are never stored and never used to train AI models. The audit trail keeps anonymized risk events (type, severity, action taken), never message text and never named individuals.