Cabell Huntington Hospital/St. Mary’s Medical Center, a merger matter in which Holden Brooks, Ben Dryden and David Simon served as counsel to St. Mary’s Medical Center, was nominated for the Global Competition Review’s (GCR) 2017 “
Merger Control Matter of the Year” award. As explained on GCR’s website, Cabell Huntington Hospital and St. Mary’s Medical Center, “the only two health systems based in Huntington, West Virginia, fended off a US FTC lawsuit to block their deal by obtaining West Virginia legislation that immunised such provider consolidations from federal antitrust review. After the state attorney general approved the merger in July 2016, the FTC
dropped its lawsuit. Of a trio of FTC challenges to hospital mergers in late 2015, this is the sole deal that was not stopped by a federal appellate court in 2016.”