Antitrust

Subscribe to Antitrust via RSS

imageClass action skeptics

Since 2011, a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court has made class actions harder to bring and tougher to sustain.

In the current term, the Court’s quintet of class action skeptics — Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas — may use a pair of cases in which it has heard arguments to all but doom wide swaths of class cases altogether.

I write not to address those cases but to explain why even if the threats they pose prove non-fatal, the reprieve may not last. Two other petitions for review on the Court’s docket pose existential threats almost as potent.
Continue Reading The Next Death Threat to Class Actions

FundingBig dollars in business cases

Expenses in big-dollar lawsuits can run into the millions of dollars. An antitrust class action that I’ve handled since 2003, for instance, cost more than $8 million. The law firms representing the class fronted all that money, with no assurance we would ever get any of it back. Why would any sane person do such a thing?
Continue Reading The Cost of Funding Litigation Expenses

FundingSizable expenses

A big commercial case can cost millions in expenses — by which I mean out-of-pocket costs that the plaintiff or its counsel must pay net of attorneys’ fees. A portfolio of cases — for infringement of a patent or family of patents, say — can run many millions more. Who will bear that burden? And what will it cost?
Continue Reading The Cost of Third-Party Litigation Funding

CompetitionThe cost of errors in antitrust

Jonathan Baker earned a J.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. (in Economics) from Stanford, served as Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission, and now teaches antitrust and economic regulation at American University’s Washington College of Law.

He’s also written an important article on how an obsession with avoiding “false positives” in antitrust litigation systematically biases courts against cases unless they involve price-fixing or market division, horizontal mergers resulting in duopoly or monopoly, or a narrow range of exclusionary conduct.
Continue Reading Fear of False Positives Distorts Antitrust

Court cuts American Express settlement
Court cuts American Express settlement

Merchants get a new chance to assert claims

Finding “egregious” misconduct by the lead lawyer for a class of American Express merchants, a New York district court rejected a request for final approval of a nationwide antitrust settlement.

The good news? American Express merchants that have…

Lessons LearnedA golden age of civil antitrust, from the 1960s into the 1980s, enriched the victims of cartels and monopolies but upset corporate America.  The high cost of paying treble damages claims eventually provoked a spare-no-expense approach to defense. That in turn influenced the way plaintiffs prosecuted their Sherman Act claims.

Much the same thing has…

IMG_0195Antitrust v. patent

The extraordinary risk in antitrust cases has prompted courts to erect ever-higher hurdles to them. Extending a trend that began decades before, the Supreme Court used a sprawling antitrust case — Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly (2007) — to toughen the test for pleading a claim. It warned about the high costs…