CFIUS and EU-FDI screening counsel: geopolitics creates a niche.

Investment screening used to be a question a company answered when it bought something sensitive. It is now answered continuously, because each of the three regimes that matter to a Washington-headquartered acquirer has been extended in a direction that outlives the transaction that triggered it.

Start with enforcement. On 18 November 2024 the Treasury issued the first substantive update to the Committee’s monitoring and enforcement provisions since 2018, expanding subpoena power over transactions that were never notified, extending liability for material misstatements to conduct outside an active review, and raising the civil-penalty ceiling. Six weeks later, on 2 January 2025, the Outbound Investment Security Program took effect under a final rule of 28 October 2024, prohibiting or requiring 30-day notification of US-person investment into China-based entities in advanced semiconductors, quantum information technology and certain artificial-intelligence systems, as the National Law Review set out at the time. Both instruments attach obligations to investments that never come near a filing.

Then the direction changed twice more. The America First Investment Policy memorandum of 21 February 2025 directed the Committee to tighten scrutiny of greenfield investment and emerging technology while building a fast-track process for allied capital. On 18 December 2025 the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act enacted the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security Act, which converted the outbound program into permanent statute and gave the Treasury 450 days to write the implementing rules, as Pillsbury set out in its analysis. A rulebook still being written while deals keep closing is not a rulebook. It is a subscription.

Screening stopped being an event a company survives and became a calendar a company keeps. Treasury’s own Known Investor Program is the clearest signal of that shift, and Sidley’s February 2026 summary of the proposal describes the buyer this article is about better than any job specification: at least three cleared CFIUS transactions in the past three years, at least one more expected within twelve months, a clean five-year compliance record, and at least half the workforce outside adversary countries. For the first time, being an organized, continuous filer is itself an asset the Committee will price.

The European turn is larger and slower. Regulation (EU) 2026/1386 was adopted by the Council on 8 June 2026 and entered into force on 16 July 2026, with its substantive obligations applying from 17 January 2028, on the corroborating accounts of Debevoise & Plimpton in June 2026 and Linklaters in July 2026. It replaces the voluntary framework of 2019 with a mandatory mechanism in all 27 member states, a common minimum sector list, and - for the first time across the bloc - a standstill obligation preventing completion before clearance. Jones Day noted in July 2026 that the call-in power reaches five years after completion for investments that were never notified.

Two features of that regulation are coordination problems rather than legal ones, and they land on the buyer. The first is the expectation that a multi-jurisdiction filing goes in on the same day in every affected member state where that is feasible. The second is the new Foreign Direct Investment Screening Coordination Group, which lets member states and the European Commission compare notes on the same investor across parallel reviews. Baker McKenzie observed on 1 July 2026 that final authority stays with each member state and Commission opinions must be duly considered rather than obeyed: one harmonized trigger, twenty-seven decision-makers, and an expectation that the acquirer sequences them.

The United Kingdom, outside that architecture, is still moving its own goalposts, and its sector list is under active revision as of July 2026. Italy is named here once and only for contrast: A&O Shearman reported on 24 July 2025 that its golden power regime drew 835 filings in 2024, up 15 percent and roughly ten times the 2019 level, of which 47 percent fell outside the regime’s scope altogether. Defensive over-filing is what happens when nobody owns the trigger analysis.

One distinction has to be made once and then left alone. Screening regimes ask whether a transaction may complete; export controls and sanctions ask whether a technology or a payment may move. They are separate statutes with separate regulators and, in most companies, separate seats. This page is about the first of the two.

Read Treasury’s Known Investor Program criteria as an organizational chart rather than an eligibility test and they describe a company with a continuous filing history, a compliance record maintained across five years, and a governance position it can evidence on demand. None of those three is a per-deal deliverable. They are the output of somebody’s standing job, and the pressure on it is not easing: the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted in 2026 that FDI-related national security investigations had grown from 67 in 2015 to 116 in 2024. Inbound capital rising by half in a single year, on the Bureau of Economic Analysis count above, against a screening apparatus widening in three jurisdictions at once, is the arithmetic behind an open requisition.

Sartori’s Washington cohort of 1,300 structured interviews includes 148 lawyers sitting in-house at corporate acquirers, sponsors and portfolio companies whose group filed with a screening authority in the twenty-four months to June 2026. Ninety-six of those 148 could not name a single person inside the company who owned the filing calendar across every regime the group files in. Forty-one of the same 148 said post-closing mitigation obligations were tracked in a spreadsheet owned by whichever deal team had closed the transaction. Thirty-three said the first screening question of the year had reached the legal department from corporate development or from finance rather than from a lawyer.

The head of legal at a US-listed industrials group with three cross-border acquisitions signed inside eighteen months put it plainly: the company had filed four times in two years and had never once been asked, internally, who decides whether the next one is a declaration or a notice. A general counsel at a sponsor-backed technology platform described the same absence from the other end. On the last three financing rounds, the question of whether a minority investment carried enough governance rights to be screened had been settled in the data room by a firm that had not seen the previous two rounds.

The buyer side is starting to hire for the credential rather than the title. The Carlyle Group announced on 1 June 2026 that its incoming general counsel, effective 29 June 2026, would report directly to the chief executive and would arrive from the top legal seat of a US intelligence agency. The release never uses the word CFIUS, and one appointment at one firm is not an industry practice. But an alternative-asset manager putting a national-security government lawyer in its own top legal seat is a data point about where that experience is now valued, and it sits on the buyer’s side of the table.

The panel firm is expert inside one regime and structurally unable to hold the sequence across the others. That is a description of how firms are instructed, not a criticism of them: the firm engaged for the US filing does not see the Finnish threshold, and Finnish counsel does not see the term sheet that created the governance right. Three candidates exist for the chair above them, and they perform very differently.

The law-firm market is the mirror of the same scarcity, and context here rather than the subject. Latham & Watkins announced on 10 June 2026 that it had hired its fifth former federal government lawyer into its CFIUS and national-security practices in sixteen months, drawn from Treasury investment security and Commerce export-control roles. Each of those moves takes a person out of the pool a company would otherwise recruit from and puts them somewhere it can only rent them.