Today, a Seventh Circuit panel upheld the tossing of an antitrust case on the ground that the plaintiff couldn’t support either of its conspiracy theories. The evidence didn’t, the Court concluded, raise an inference of a group boycott among competing grout and mortar distributors (horizontal conspiracy) or an agreement between the distributors and their supplier to fix resale prices (vertical conspiracy). Miles Distributors, Inc. v. Specialty Construction Brands, Inc., No. 05-1992 (7th Cir. Feb. 6, 2007) (opinion here).
The decision points up, yet again, the difficulty of plaintiffs’ winning a distributor termination case.
