CMA Merger & Competition Case Change Signals

Tracks important state changes in official Competition and Markets Authority case records for regulatory-intelligence workflows. It is designed for corporate-development, competition, legal-operations, and market-intelligence teams; it is not a case-finder scrape or outcome predictor.

Official source and licence

Only CMA cases and projects on GOV.UK, its official Atom feed, and linked official case pages are used. GOV.UK content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 unless otherwise stated. Attribution: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The canonical GOV.UK case URL is the stable key. Titles alone are never matched. The full normalized snapshot includes title, case type/state, opened/closed/updated dates, parties, phase, outcome, remedy text, publication links and official URL.

Signals

Supported: NEW_CASE, NEW_MERGER_INQUIRY, CASE_UPDATED, CASE_STATUS_CHANGED, PHASE_2_REFERRED, MERGER_CLEARED, CASE_CLOSED, CLEARED_WITH_REMEDIES, MERGER_PROHIBITED, NEW_CONSUMER_ENFORCEMENT_CASE, NEW_COMPETITION_ENFORCEMENT_CASE, REMEDY_UPDATED, and DECISION_PUBLISHED. Regulatory meanings are emitted only from explicit official case type, state, outcome, remedy, or publication wording. Null transitions do not create regulatory-state signals.

The first live run follows all official listing pages and case pages to create a full baseline with zero signals. Later runs use the official Atom feed to identify new/updated candidates, fetch those case pages, and merge them into the complete snapshot. A daily schedule is recommended.

{ "mode": "live", "caseTypes": ["Mergers"], "signalTypes": ["PHASE_2_REFERRED", "MERGER_CLEARED"], "maxItems": 1000 }

{ "signalType": "CASE_STATUS_CHANGED", "title": "Sample case", "caseType": "Mergers", "status": "Closed", "previousValue": "Open", "currentValue": "Closed", "signalSummary": "CASE STATUS CHANGED: Sample case", "sourceUrl": "https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/sample-case" }

Filters and maxItems control Dataset output only. Sample mode runs deterministic fixtures through production normalization, diff, and filtering before any network or production KVS access and reports snapshotUpdated: false. The compressed KVS snapshot remains complete; every Dataset item is one signal. Parser fixtures, critical-field checks, pagination/feed checks, and count-collapse guards fail explicitly and retain the prior snapshot when source structure becomes unsafe.

Limitations: the initial baseline is network/compute intensive; subsequent feed processing depends on GOV.UK feed coverage. Publication wording varies, so only explicit supported phrases are classified. This Actor is not complete regulatory due diligence or competition-law advice.