Andrea Appella

Andrea is a senior and highly respected practitioner in competition law with recognised international experience. Andrea’s professional and academic expertise is competition law and IP with a particular focus on the media industry, where he worked for most of his career. He has been involved in a wide range of market-leading competition cases in the media industry, advising executives on some of the most transformational cases, deals and competition policy developments across all media sectors (movies, TV networks, pay-tv platforms, music, sport, publishing, online). Andrea is currently Director, Global Competition at Netflix.

After beginning his career as a solicitor at Herbert Smith (1994-1997), he worked for MTV Europe (1998-1999), Warner Bros (1999-2002), Time Warner Europe (Associate General Counsel, 2003-2008) and 21^st Century Fox - formerly News Corporation – (Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, 2009-2019).

Andrea was also Director of International at the UK Competition Authority, the Office of Fair Trading, in 2008 and 2009, where he was in charge of developing the OFT’s international strategy and led the team responsible for the OFT’s international activities (representing the UK and contributing to multilateral competition bodies such as OECD, ICN and ECN, leading bilateral relationships with foreign competition and consumer authorities, as well as supporting cross-border enforcement actions).

He is currently a Visiting Professor at Kings College Dickson Poon School of Law, where he teaches the course “Competition and Intellectual Property in the Media Industry: Law and Practice” in the LLM programme.

Andrea held leadership positions within the IBA Antitrust Committee, of which he was a co-chair in 2014-2015. He was featured in Global Competition Review’s list of top in-house antitrust lawyers in the world (Corporate Counsel 2019) and among the “Stars of the In-House Competition Bar” in Global Competition Review (March 2005)). He is a frequent speaker at competition law and media law conferences and is a Non-Governmental Advisor to the International Competition Network (ICN).

Andrea earned his first law degree, magna cum laude, at the Libera Universita’ Internazionale degli Studi Sociali in Rome, and an L.L.M., with Merit, from the London School of Economics. He is a member of the bar in both Italy (as an avvocato) and England (as a solicitor).