Antitrust and Competition Law
Over the past forty years, Cohen Milstein lawyers have led the field challenging price-fixing conspiracies, market-allocation agreements, and monopolization schemes in the United States and abroad. During that time, our antitrust group has grown to become the largest Plaintiffs’-side antitrust practice in the world, and our attorneys in that practice have recovered billions of dollars that our clients were unlawfully required to pay price-fixers, cartelists and monopolists, whose schemes violated federal, state, and foreign laws. Our work for our clients has improved the quality and availability of legal recourse for aggrieved businesses and individuals worldwide, and our attorneys have been recognized as “among the best antitrust litigators in the country.”1 Michael Hausfeld, the Chairperson of the firm and the head of the antitrust practice group, consistently has been named one of the top ten attorneys in the District of Columbia.
Under Mr. Hausfeld’s direction, our victories in the competition arena have made us the global leader in prosecuting and coordinating claims on behalf of groups of businesses and individuals. For example, Cohen Milstein was selected by Chief Judge Hogan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia as co-lead counsel to represent buyers of vitamins around the globe. In that role, we recovered over a billion dollars in overcharges that had been imposed by the members of a conspiracy of bulk vitamin manufacturers. First, Cohen Milstein engineered a settlement with the vast majority of bulk vitamin manufacturers in the world. Second, when one Defendant in the conspiracy, Mitsui, refused to settle on reasonable terms, our lawyers took the case to trial and obtained a judgment which when settled was over $150 million in favor of the class of US purchasers we represented. Finally, although our work on behalf of our US clients already had obtained one of the largest recoveries in antitrust law history, we litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of foreign purchasers of Vitamins. The Court confirmed that U.S. claims against worldwide cartels may continue to be brought in the U.S. courts. Cohen Milstein is now the leading firm in the world for the prosecution of global conspiracies, and the only Claimants’ law firm with offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, San Francisco and London. The resources these offices provide, and the expertise of the attorneys litigating in these offices, allow us successfully to litigate against the biggest and most powerful corporations.
Indeed, in state and federal courts around the country we have prevailed against some of the world’s largest corporations. One of our founding partners, Jerry Cohen, obtained what was at the time the largest jury verdict in history against Exxon in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1994. We also have either won at trial or successfully settled (often on the eve of trial) claims against Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Texaco, and the manufacturers of infant formula (Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Mead Johnson), flat glass (Pilkington PLC et al.), and thermal fax paper (Mitsubishi Corp. et al.), among others. In November 2003, our attorneys obtained a $56 million judgment for our clients following a two-week jury trial against the four largest blueberry processors in Maine. This remains the largest judgment in Maine history.
Prosecuting global conspiracies requires global capabilities. As the United States Department of Justice has recognized, “effective prosecution of an international cartel requires coordination... because conspiratorial meetings frequently take place in more than one country and witnesses and documentary evidence may be scattered around the world.” The recent opening of our London office this year has heightened our ability to prosecute global conspiracies, and will permit us to become the leading legal authority for claimants throughout Europe, as we already are in the United States. The Guardian commented in an August 2007 article referring to class action litigation involving price-fixing between Virgin Airlines and British Airways, in which Cohen Milstein was selected as one of two co-lead counsel: “[t]he only bright spot is the involvement of Michael Hausfeld, a US litigator of fearsome repute who specialises in class actions and has pledged to file suit so that the millions ‘that were victims of this cartel have the opportunity to recover that which was robbed from them’. It's not often one feels glad to welcome an American lawyer, but for Mr. Hausfeld we must make the exception.”
Given our history, it is no surprise that Cohen Milstein is a leader in competition-policy debates around the world. We host and lecture at conferences on issues such as the pursuit of damage actions in the U.S. and European Union, private enforcement of EU laws, the principle of international comity and the extraterritorial jurisdiction of U.S. antitrust laws. In 2007, the Legal 500 said of our firm: “[a]dmired and envied in equivalent measures, class-action heavyweight Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll cuts a formidable figure in the antitrust litigation arena and has set the bar for plaintiffs’ firms around the country.”
1 Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan, In re Lorazepam and Clorazepate Antitrust Litigation
2 United States D.C. Cir. Br. At 25
Recent Firm Writings on Antitrust Issues
For more information, please contact us at lawinfo@cmht.com.
