California Antitrust Litigation Lawyers
Anticompetitive conduct can distort prices, restrict consumer choice, exclude competitors, and shift substantial amounts of money from consumers and businesses to companies that have unlawfully interfered with competition. Uncovering that conduct can require years of transaction data, internal corporate records, economic analysis, expert testimony, and litigation against some of the largest companies in the market.
Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP represents consumers, businesses, and other plaintiffs in complex antitrust litigation throughout California. Our attorneys pursue claims involving price fixing, market allocation, monopolization, exclusionary practices, restraints on competition, and other conduct prohibited by state and federal antitrust laws.
The firm’s antitrust experience includes major consumer class actions and pharmaceutical litigation. Managing Partner Ralph B. Kalfayan has served in significant leadership roles in complex antitrust cases, including In re Cipro I and II, which ultimately resulted in a $400 million settlement, and In re Allergan, which resulted in a $13.4 million settlement.
Antitrust Litigation Protects Competition When the Market Has Been Distorted
Businesses ordinarily compete over price, customers, products, services, innovation, and market share. Antitrust litigation can arise when competitors coordinate instead of competing or when a company uses unlawful exclusionary conduct to obtain or preserve market power.
An antitrust case usually goes deeper than identifying conduct that appears unfair. The evidence must connect the challenged conduct to competition in the relevant market and to an injury suffered by the plaintiffs. Depending on the claim, that can require examining pricing histories, communications among competitors, contracts, market structure, barriers to entry, purchasing records, and the economic effects of the defendants’ conduct.
Consumers can suffer harm through inflated prices or reduced competition. Businesses can lose customers, sales, access to suppliers, or the ability to compete effectively. In class litigation, relatively small losses spread among thousands or millions of purchasers can collectively represent substantial economic harm.
Our California antitrust lawyers develop these cases around the market conduct and evidence necessary to establish both the violation and the financial consequences that followed.
Price Fixing and Agreements Among Competitors
Price fixing occurs when competitors agree to raise, lower, stabilize, or otherwise coordinate prices instead of making independent pricing decisions. The agreement does not have to appear in a formal written contract. Communications, parallel conduct combined with other evidence, meetings, pricing data, and internal documents can help establish whether competitors coordinated their behavior.
Price-fixing arrangements can extend beyond the advertised price of a product. Agreements affecting discounts, fees, financing terms, bids, production levels, purchasing prices, or other components of a transaction can also interfere with competition.
Federal antitrust law treats straightforward agreements among competitors to fix prices as particularly serious restraints on trade. California’s Cartwright Act likewise prohibits combinations designed to control prices or restrict competition.
The financial effects can spread throughout a distribution chain. A pricing agreement between manufacturers, for example, can eventually increase what distributors, retailers, businesses, health plans, or individual consumers pay for the affected product.
Market Allocation, Bid Rigging, and Agreements Not to Compete
Competition also suffers when businesses agree to divide the market among themselves. Competitors might allocate customers, territories, products, suppliers, or other parts of a market so each company faces less meaningful competition.
A customer-allocation agreement can allow competing companies to decide which customers each will pursue. Territorial allocation can divide cities, states, regions, or other geographic areas. Bid-rigging schemes can manipulate the competitive bidding process by determining who will submit the winning bid or how competing bids will be structured.
Evidence of these arrangements can be difficult to obtain because unlawful coordination is rarely advertised. Emails, text messages, meeting records, bid histories, pricing patterns, trade-association communications, testimony from industry participants, and economic evidence can become important parts of the case.
Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP investigates both the agreement itself and the financial harm that resulted from reduced competition.
Monopolization and Exclusionary Conduct
A company with substantial market power can affect competitors, suppliers, customers, and market development itself. Section 2 of the Sherman Act focuses on conduct used to acquire, preserve, or attempt to acquire monopoly power through exclusionary or predatory means.
Monopolization cases frequently require a detailed analysis of the relevant product and geographic market. The inquiry can include the company’s market share, available substitutes, barriers facing new competitors, customer behavior, pricing power, distribution channels, and the durability of the company’s position.
The conduct used to maintain that position is equally important. Exclusive arrangements, tying practices, predatory conduct, restrictions on access to essential inputs, or other exclusionary strategies can become significant when they prevent rivals from competing on the merits.
Market definition and economic evidence often sit at the center of these disputes. Our attorneys work with appropriate experts and industry evidence to evaluate how the challenged conduct affected competition and the plaintiffs who participated in the market.
Exclusive Dealing and Tying Arrangements
Contracts between businesses can shape who is able to buy, sell, distribute, or compete within a market. Exclusive dealing arrangements can raise antitrust concerns when their practical effect is to foreclose a substantial portion of the market from competitors or make meaningful market entry more difficult.
Tying arrangements involve conditioning the availability of one product or service on the purchase of another. The competitive significance depends heavily on the defendant’s market position, the products involved, the structure of the transaction, and the actual effect on competition.
These cases tend to be fact-intensive. Contract language alone rarely tells the entire story. Market share, contract duration, alternative suppliers, switching costs, distribution networks, customer behavior, and the ability of competitors to reach the market can all affect the analysis.
Our attorneys examine how the agreement operates in the real market rather than treating the contract in isolation.
Pharmaceutical Antitrust Litigation
Few industries demonstrate the consequences of delayed or restricted competition as clearly as the pharmaceutical market. Even a limited period without meaningful generic or competing products can result in substantial additional costs for consumers, insurers, health plans, pharmacies, and other purchasers.
Pharmaceutical antitrust cases can involve agreements affecting generic entry, allegedly anticompetitive patent settlements, price coordination, market allocation, or other conduct that restricts competition for prescription drugs.
Managing Partner Ralph B. Kalfayan has extensive experience in pharmaceutical antitrust litigation. He served as liaison counsel for the consumer class in In re Cipro I and II, litigation involving an agreement affecting competition for the antibiotic Cipro. The coordinated cases ultimately produced a resolution exceeding $400 million globally.
Mr. Kalfayan has also written about pharmaceutical competition and the United States Supreme Court’s decision in FTC v. Actavis, Inc., which addressed antitrust scrutiny of certain pharmaceutical patent settlements.
Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP brings that background to antitrust matters where competition law intersects with pharmaceuticals, intellectual property, consumer purchasing, and complex economic evidence.
California Antitrust Claims Under the Cartwright Act
California has its own antitrust statute, the Cartwright Act. The law prohibits combinations of two or more persons or entities formed for purposes that include restricting trade, reducing production, increasing prices, preventing competition, or controlling prices.
For plaintiffs harmed in California markets, the Cartwright Act can be particularly significant. California Business and Professions Code Section 16750 permits a person injured in business or property by conduct prohibited under the Act to seek three times the damages sustained, along with available injunctive relief, reasonable attorneys’ fees, and litigation costs.
California law can also provide a path for qualifying indirect purchasers. Section 16750 expressly states that an injured person can bring an action regardless of whether that person dealt directly or indirectly with the defendant.
Indirect-purchaser claims can arise when an antitrust violation occurs higher in the distribution chain, but the resulting overcharge is ultimately passed to downstream purchasers. Consumers who purchased a product through a retailer, for example, may have paid a price affected by alleged conduct between manufacturers even though they never purchased directly from those manufacturers.
Determining whether a Cartwright Act claim exists requires careful analysis of the underlying conduct, the relevant market, the purchasing chain, and the economic injury caused by the alleged restraint.
Federal Antitrust Claims Under the Sherman and Clayton Acts
Federal antitrust litigation commonly involves the Sherman Act and Clayton Act.
Section 1 of the Sherman Act addresses agreements that unreasonably restrain trade. Price fixing, bid rigging, and straightforward market-allocation agreements among competitors receive particularly strict treatment because of their direct effect on competition.
Section 2 addresses monopolization, attempted monopolization, and conspiracies to monopolize. These cases typically examine both the defendant’s power within a relevant market and the conduct used to acquire or maintain that power.
The Clayton Act supplements the Sherman Act and addresses additional forms of anticompetitive conduct. It also provides private remedies for parties harmed by violations of federal antitrust law. Successful private plaintiffs can potentially recover treble damages and attorneys’ fees under applicable federal law.
The Federal Trade Commission Act provides another major component of federal competition law and gives the FTC authority to challenge unfair methods of competition. Private antitrust claims, however, generally proceed through statutes such as the Sherman and Clayton Acts rather than through a private cause of action under the FTC Act.
California antitrust litigation can involve federal claims, state Cartwright Act claims, or both, depending on the parties, market, alleged conduct, and nature of the injury.
Antitrust Class Actions Can Address Widespread Economic Harm
Anticompetitive conduct often affects a large group in a similar way. A price-fixing arrangement involving a widely purchased product might increase the price paid by hundreds of thousands of consumers. An agreement affecting a prescription drug can impose overcharges on individual patients, insurers, health plans, and other purchasers throughout the market.
Class actions provide a mechanism to address those widespread losses collectively when the legal requirements for class treatment are satisfied. Rather than requiring every purchaser to litigate the same underlying conduct independently, a class case can address common questions concerning the defendants’ actions, market effects, and damages across a defined group.
Building an antitrust class action can require extensive work before the merits ever reach a jury. Attorneys may need to establish the class definition, analyze transaction and pricing data, retain economists, identify methods for measuring common impact, address challenges to class certification, and manage discovery involving large corporate defendants.
Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP has experience with the demands of large consumer and indirect-purchaser cases and the litigation required to move complex class claims forward.
Evidence Used to Prove an Antitrust Violation
Antitrust cases frequently develop from evidence that would have little significance if viewed one document at a time. The broader record can reveal how competitors communicated, how pricing decisions changed, how market participants responded, and whether the challenged behavior can be explained by ordinary independent competition.
Depending on the allegations, important evidence can include:
- Internal emails and corporate communications
- Text messages and messaging-platform records
- Pricing and transaction databases
- Contracts and distribution agreements
- Sales records
- Bid histories
- Competitor communications
- Trade-association records
- Board and management documents
- Market-share and industry data
- Purchasing records
- Deposition testimony
- Economic and statistical analysis
Expert economists can play an important role in defining markets, evaluating competitive effects, analyzing pricing, measuring overcharges, and estimating damages. Industry specialists can help explain commercial practices or technical aspects of the market.
The strength of an antitrust claim often emerges from the relationship among these different forms of evidence rather than from one document or one witness.
Measuring Financial Harm From Anticompetitive Conduct
Proving unlawful conduct is one part of an antitrust claim. Plaintiffs must also establish an injury recognized by antitrust law and connect their losses to the conduct being challenged.
In an overcharge case, economic analysis may compare the prices actually paid with an estimate of prices that would have existed under competitive conditions. Other cases can involve lost sales, reduced output, exclusion from a market, increased costs, or damage to a business caused by an unlawful restraint.
The analysis becomes more complicated when products move through multiple levels of distribution. Economists may need to determine how an overcharge traveled from a manufacturer through wholesalers and retailers before reaching downstream purchasers.
California’s treatment of indirect purchasers makes this analysis particularly important in Cartwright Act litigation.
Antitrust Claims Brought by Businesses
Consumers are not the only parties harmed by restrictions on competition. Businesses can suffer substantial losses when competitors, suppliers, dominant firms, or other market participants engage in anticompetitive conduct.
A company can face higher input costs because of price fixing, lose access to customers through market allocation, encounter exclusionary agreements that block important distribution channels, or suffer lost sales because a dominant competitor used unlawful practices to maintain market control.
Our firm’s broader business litigation and civil litigation experience can be particularly useful in antitrust disputes involving commercial relationships, contracts, corporate records, accounting evidence, and substantial financial damages.
Business antitrust claims require a strategy grounded in both competition law and the commercial reality of the market in which the company operates.
Experience in Major Antitrust and Class Action Litigation
Complex antitrust cases can involve national corporations, extensive discovery, sophisticated economic defenses, years of litigation, and appellate proceedings that shape the law itself. Experience with cases of that scale can make a meaningful difference in how a claim is investigated and developed.
Ralph B. Kalfayan has practiced law for more than three decades and has served as lead counsel, liaison counsel, and in other significant leadership roles in complex class litigation. His antitrust experience includes:
In re Cipro I and II
Mr. Kalfayan served as liaison counsel for the consumer class in litigation involving competition for the antibiotic Cipro. The litigation resulted in a published California Supreme Court decision addressing pharmaceutical pay-for-delay agreements under the Cartwright Act and ultimately resolved for more than $400 million globally with the defendants.
In re Allergan
Mr. Kalfayan held a significant role in this federal litigation, which resulted in a $13.4 million settlement.
His antitrust background also includes extensive work involving consumer protection, indirect purchasers, business disputes, and complex civil litigation.
Past results cannot guarantee a particular result in another case. They do demonstrate the level of litigation our attorneys have handled and the experience Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP brings to sophisticated antitrust disputes.
Why Antitrust Cases Require Experienced Litigation Counsel
Antitrust litigation brings together law, economics, industry structure, corporate discovery, and financial analysis. A case can turn on the definition of a market, the distinction between independent business behavior and coordinated conduct, the defendant’s market power, the movement of an overcharge through the distribution chain, or the methodology used to calculate damages.
Large defendants often have substantial litigation resources and access to economists, industry experts, and extensive corporate records. Plaintiffs need a case theory that can withstand challenges to standing, causation, class certification, expert testimony, damages, and the merits of the underlying antitrust allegations.
Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP approaches these cases as complex litigation from the beginning. Our attorneys focus on developing the factual record, identifying the economic theory supported by the evidence, and preparing the case for the contested stages that can determine whether it settles or goes to trial.
Frequently Asked Questions About California Antitrust Litigation
What is an antitrust lawsuit?
An antitrust lawsuit challenges conduct that unlawfully restricts competition. Claims can involve price fixing, bid rigging, market allocation, monopolization, exclusionary practices, tying arrangements, or other agreements and conduct that distort a competitive market. Private plaintiffs can include consumers, businesses, and other parties that suffered qualifying economic harm.
What is the California Cartwright Act?
The Cartwright Act is California’s primary state antitrust statute. It prohibits combinations that restrict trade or competition, including certain agreements affecting prices and market competition. California law also provides private remedies for qualifying plaintiffs injured by prohibited conduct.
Can consumers sue for price fixing in California?
Consumers who suffered a qualifying economic injury from unlawful price fixing may be able to pursue a claim under California or federal antitrust law, depending on the circumstances. California’s Cartwright Act can be especially important because it expressly permits qualifying claims by indirect as well as direct purchasers.
Can a business bring an antitrust claim?
Yes. Businesses can pursue antitrust claims when unlawful restraints on competition cause injury to their business or property. Claims can arise from price fixing, market allocation, exclusionary arrangements, monopolistic conduct, or other anticompetitive practices.
Is having a monopoly automatically an antitrust violation?
A monopolization claim focuses on how a company acquired or maintained monopoly power. Section 2 of the Sherman Act can apply when a company uses exclusionary or predatory conduct to obtain, preserve, or attempt to obtain monopoly power in a relevant market. Market power, market structure, and the defendant’s conduct all require careful analysis.
What damages are available in an antitrust lawsuit?
Federal and California antitrust laws can permit successful private plaintiffs to recover three times qualifying damages. Depending on the claim, additional remedies can include injunctive relief, attorneys’ fees, and litigation costs. The remedies available in a particular case depend on the governing law and the nature of the plaintiff’s injury.
Can an antitrust case be filed as a class action?
Yes, when the requirements for class certification are satisfied. Antitrust class actions are commonly used when the same alleged conduct affected a large number of consumers or other purchasers. Class certification can require substantial economic and factual evidence showing how common issues and alleged antitrust impact can be addressed across the proposed class.
What evidence can reveal price fixing or collusion?
Direct communications between competitors can provide powerful evidence, but antitrust cases can also rely on circumstantial evidence. Pricing patterns, suspicious bid activity, internal corporate communications, trade-association meetings, competitor contacts, transaction data, and unexplained changes in market behavior can all become relevant to determining whether businesses coordinated their conduct.
How long does an antitrust lawsuit take?
Antitrust cases can involve extensive discovery, expert analysis, class-certification proceedings, dispositive motions, trial, and appeals. The timetable depends on the size and complexity of the case, number of defendants, volume of evidence, and issues being disputed.
Speak With a California Antitrust Lawyer at Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP
Anticompetitive conduct can remain hidden for years while consumers and businesses continue paying higher prices or operating within a market distorted by unlawful restraints. Once potential misconduct comes to light, transaction records, communications, pricing evidence, and other information can become critical to determining whether an antitrust claim exists.
Kalfayan Merjanian, LLP represents consumers, businesses, and other plaintiffs in complex antitrust and class action litigation throughout California. Contact our firm to speak with an experienced California antitrust lawyer and learn how we can evaluate the conduct, economic harm, and legal claims involved.