Antitrust

We defended Qualcomm at trial against the FTC’s claims that it had failed to license its standard-essential patents at fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory royalty rates and that Qualcomm had engaged in exclusionary conduct that increased its competitors’ costs and reduced their ability to innovate. We won an appeal before the Ninth Circuit that reversed and vacated the district court’s injunction.

We defended Qualcomm against antitrust claims made by a putative class of 250 million cellphone users (one of the largest class actions ever) alleging that Qualcomm had inflated mobile device prices through its standard-essential patent licensing practices. The Ninth Circuit granted a petition for interlocutory review of the court’s class certification order, and ultimately overturned certification, ruling that the district court erred in its choice of law analysis and found that differences in state antitrust laws preclude the uniform application of California’s Cartwright Act to antitrust actions filed by consumers nationwide. On remand, we eliminated the remaining claims via subsequent motions to dismiss and summary judgment, resulting in a complete victory for Qualcomm.

We represented Black Knight in a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission attempting to block Intercontinental Exchange’s acquisition of Black Knight as allegedly anticompetitive. Intercontinental Exchange (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) entered into an agreement to acquire Black Knight, which provides software, data and analytics to the real estate and housing finance markets, for $13.1 billion. Following certain divestiture agreements, we convinced the FTC to drop its suit and allow the merger to proceed.

We represented the PGA TOUR in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 11 professional golfers who left the PGA TOUR and joined LIV Golf. We defeated plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order seeking to force the PGA TOUR to allow them to play in the FedExCup Playoffs. We also won a motion to compel subpoena compliance from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, overcoming their assertion of sovereign immunity—a groundbreaking victory with far-reaching implications for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In response, LIV dismissed the case to pursue a merger.

We represented Commercial Real Estate Exchange, Inc. (CREXi), a fast-growing online commercial real estate marketplace, in competitor litigation against industry giant CoStar. After CoStar filed a complaint against CREXi alleging copyright violations, we asserted antitrust counterclaims–—supported on appeal by the FTC—alleging that CoStar is an unlawful monopolist. We convinced the Ninth Circuit to reverse its dismissal of our antitrust claims in a unanimous, published opinion.

The city of San Jose sued our client, Major League Baseball, alleging antitrust violations and various state law claims related to the Oakland Athletics possible relocation to San Jose. The lawsuit claimed that Major League Baseball and its commissioner violated state and federal laws regarding unfair business practices and anticompetitive conduct. It also challenged MLB’s century-old exemption from antitrust regulation as guaranteed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. We successfully moved to dismiss plaintiffs’ antitrust claims, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling, and we convinced the Supreme Court of the United States to decline a petition for certiorari.

We successfully defended Major League Baseball, its Commissioner and 30 Baseball Clubs from a putative class action. The plaintiffs, former minor league players, alleged that minor league baseball’s labor system violates federal antitrust law. We convinced the court to dismiss the complaint because Baseball’s antitrust exemption bars plaintiffs’ claims.

We successfully defended a putative class action brought by minor league players to challenge Major League Baseball’s long-standing exemption from antitrust laws. We won a motion to dismiss the case, an alleged wage-fixing antitrust action, which was upheld by the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review.

At the pleading stage, we successfully defeated a putative class action filed against Major League Baseball, its current and former Commissioners, and all 30 Baseball Clubs. The plaintiffs, two former baseball scouts, claimed that defendants had violated federal and state antitrust law by allegedly conspiring to decrease competition in the labor market for scouts. By convincing the court that the employment of baseball scouts falls within the scope of Baseball’s antitrust exemption, we successfully obtained a complete dismissal.

We negotiated a settlement for Sutter Health with the California Attorney General’s Office, in a suit that alleged Sutter exploited its size and reach to extract “illegally inflated prices” from insurers, employers, and patients.

We led a defense group including Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar and negotiated a settlement in an antitrust class action regarding claims by 64,000 workers against the companies for alleged “no-cold-call” agreements that allegedly restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.

Following on the heels of In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, a class of animation workers filed a separate antitrust class action against Disney, Pixar, Lucasfilm, DreamWorks, Sony Pictures, Blue Sky Studios, and others related to no-cold-call agreements among animation studios. We represented Disney, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Dreamworks. That case also ended in a settlement with the certified class.

We represented various Honda entities in a multi-forum federal and state litigation involving an alleged conspiracy among automakers to restrict the gray-market export of new cars from Canada to the United States. A class was initially certified in the lead federal multi-district case, but we successfully persuaded the First Circuit to vacate the certification and impose a stringent standard barring the certification of a class with uninjured members. The federal court then granted summary judgment in defendants’ favor, ruling that plaintiffs could not prove that the alleged conspiracy caused harm to the entire class. After that, the focus shifted to the consolidated California state case, where we won summary judgment on the merits, persuading the court that there were no facts that could support a conclusion that either Honda entity had conspired with any other defendant.

We defended Visa USA, Inc. in one of the largest private civil antitrust matters in U.S. history. Discover sued MasterCard and Visa for alleged antitrust violations, claiming that credit card network rules affected member banks’ ability to issue American Express and Discover cards. The case settled on the eve of trial for billions less than Discover claimed. We also defended Visa in a similar action brought by American Express.

We defended Paramedics Plus from American Medical Response’s (AMR) claims of anticompetitive unfair business practices. After losing the competitive bidding process for Alameda County’s emergency medical services transportation contract to its much smaller rival Paramedics Plus, AMR accused our client of violating California's predatory pricing law, Business & Professions Code Section 17043, in its bid to win the 911 ambulance contract. Despite a minimal amount of precedent, we were able to preserve the statute’s intent, which is to safeguard healthy competition by protecting smaller companies from larger rivals. We received a unanimous 12-0 jury verdict in favor of our client.

We defended the former CEO of Bumble Bee Foods in a five-week jury trial in the Northern District of California against charges that he conspired to fix prices of canned tuna sold in the United States.