What statute requires parties to file premerger notification before closing a deal?
The Hart-Scott-Rodino provision, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 18a, requires parties to a reportable acquisition to file premerger notification with the FTC and the Department of Justice and to observe a waiting period before completing the transaction.
The answer
The filing and waiting period
15 U.S.C. § 18a requires that, before consummating an acquisition meeting the statutory size thresholds, the acquiring and acquired persons file notification with the Federal Trade Commission and the Assistant Attorney General and wait the specified period before closing. The waiting period gives the antitrust agencies an opportunity to review the transaction before it is completed.
A procedural gate, not the merger ban
The HSR requirement is procedural. It does not itself declare a merger unlawful; it forces advance notice and a review window so that the agencies can decide whether to challenge the deal under the substantive merger statute.
The judged input
What the AI drafted
Submitted to the judgeThis is an excerpt from a draft HSR compliance advisory memo — the kind of work product a lawyer generates with a legal-AI drafting tool, then has to stand behind. Kingsfield does not write it; it rules on the citations the model put in it. This draft cites two authorities; one of them is wrong.
The judge ruled on every citation as the draft used it — it accepted 15 U.S.C. § 18a and rejected 15 U.S.C. § 18. Here is why.
The verdict
How Kingsfield ruled
Ruled 2026-06-23Each citation in the draft above was submitted to the Kingsfield judge and ruled against the primary-law corpus — Accept, Reject, or Inconclusive, per citation. These are live verdicts, not editorial. Each card shows the claim the draft made and the verbatim authority the verdict was rendered against.
The draft claimed: Before consummating a reportable acquisition, the acquiring and acquired persons must file premerger notification with the Federal Trade Commission and the Assistant Attorney General and observe the statutory waiting period before completing the transaction.
“§ 18a Except as exempted pursuant to subsection (c), no person shall acquire, directly or indirectly, any voting securities or assets of any other person, unless both persons (or in the case of a tender offer, the acquiring person) file notification pursuant to rules under subsection (d)(1) and the waiting period described in subsection (b)(1) has…”
Cite found; proposition supported by the cited text.
The draft claimed: Section 18 imposes the premerger notification filing and waiting-period requirement that the parties must satisfy before they may close a reportable acquisition.
Cite found, but the cited text does not support the claim. 15 U.S.C. 18 is the substantive Clayton Section 7 prohibition on acquisitions whose effect may be to substantially lessen competition; the premerger notification and waiting-period mechanism is in 15 U.S.C. 18a. Regenerate with the correct authority.
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Connect the Judge See the architectureThis page is legal information, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. The draft shown is an illustration of a typical AI answer; verdicts reflect the cited authority in the Kingsfield corpus as of the ruling date shown above.