Litigation & Investigations

The Tenth Circuit recently affirmed both class certification and one of the largest verdicts issued in the U.S. this year, denying Dow Chemical Company’s (“Dow”) appeal in a price fixing case related to polyurethane products.

In recent years, antitrust criminal enforcement efforts have increased around the world. These efforts focus mainly on cartels — which the Supreme Court calls “the supreme evil of antitrust” — that conspire to fix prices, rig bids, or allocate markets.

In a noteworthy recent decision addressing the parameters of damages in commercial litigation, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) affirmed an order excluding expert testimony concerning future lost profits damages relating to “yet-to-be conceived future products.”

On February 19, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that state-action immunity does not protect a state-created hospital authority from antitrust scrutiny over a proposed hospital merger where the anticompetitive effect of such merger was not a “foreseeable result” authorized by the state. FTC v. Phoebe Putney Health System, Inc., 568 U.S. ___ (2013).

The California Supreme Court, in Aryeh v. Canon Business Solutions, Inc., 2013 WL 263509 (January 24, 2013), resolved a split in the lower appellate courts over the applicability of common law rules of accrual to the statute of limitations in California’s Unfair Competition Law (Cal. B&P Code § 17200, “UCL”).