Policy · Competition & Consumer Law
Competitor contact and information-sharing protocol (trade associations, joint ventures, benchmarking and clean teams)
Protocol for staff who deal with competitors: what must never be discussed or exchanged, rules for industry association meetings and benchmarking, a clean-team procedure for deal or joint venture information, logging contacts, and what to do if a competitor raises prices or bids.
- Kind
- Policy. A policy or procedure for a firm or client.
- Where it applies
- Australia
- AI use
- Yellow AI can help in set ways. A lawyer checks specific points before use.
- Law stated as at
- 18 October 2026
- Status
- Maintained. Checked on 18 October 2026 against the authority it cites, for Australia.
- Version
- 1
- Source
- Written for this library
When to use it
Adopt for any business whose staff meet competitors through industry associations, joint ventures, supply or co-tendering arrangements, benchmarking surveys or M&A due diligence. Use it with the competition law compliance policy and the algorithmic pricing policy in this library.
Used for these tasks
Each task page says how far AI may help with the task and what the lawyer must review.
How AI may be used
AI may maintain the competitor contact log and flag agenda items or documents that touch prohibited topics; the lawyer decides what may be shared, approves clean-team members and handles any suspected cartel conduct.
AI may
- Log competitor contacts from calendars and meeting notes into the register in this protocol, for staff to confirm
- Flag agenda items, emails or data requests that mention prices, margins, customers, territories, capacity, bids or wages, for legal review
- Check that benchmarking data received is aggregated and historical as the protocol requires, and flag exceptions
AI must not
- Must not decide whether a contact or exchange is lawful
- Must not receive or process a competitor’s competitively sensitive information outside the approved clean team
- Must not be used to monitor or match competitors’ prices in a way that substitutes for independent pricing decisions
The lawyer checks
- Each joint venture, co-tender or collaboration has been assessed for the cartel provisions and any exception before information is exchanged
- Clean-team members are named, have no pricing or bidding role for the period, and have signed the undertaking
- Industry association agendas were reviewed before the meeting and minutes after it
- Any report of a competitor raising prices, customers, bids or capacity is escalated to legal on the day, and immunity is considered if the business may be involved
Method: how the Green, Yellow and Red levels are decided. This is guidance for planning, not legal advice.
Read the full text
The full text is for signed-in accounts. It is free. When you sign in you can:
- read the whole precedent, with its drafting notes beside it;
- copy it, or download it as a Word file or Markdown;
- add it to your firm’s knowledge base, so colleagues can find it;
- let the AI tools you connect read it from that knowledge base.
The summary, the law it rests on and the AI-use guidance above stay public. Privacy.
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