Antitrust Litigation

Many businesses of all types are frequently confronted with problems arising under the antitrust laws, which play a vital role in ensuring that our economy continues to be based on competition rather than collusion. The fundamental premises of the antitrust laws are two: (1) the American economic system does best when business enterprises are free to compete among themselves; and (2) interference with the pricing system is almost always presumptively unlawful because it distorts the free market forces that adjust supply to demand through competitive pricing. However, large companies do not always find it in their interest to abide by these rules, and in the process may inflict considerable damage on their competitive rivals.

Thus, practices such as geographic division among competitors, cartels, agreements to fix or stabilize the price of goods or services, and conditioning the sale of one item on the purchaser's agreement to buy another are, depending on the exact circumstances, unlawful under current antitrust law. Moreover, a monopolist -- i.e., an enterprise that dominates and controls a specific market -- is prohibited from engaging in conduct (such as market exclusion) to the detriment of its smaller competitors because the law disfavors the aggregation of monopoly power.

The firm's clients regularly benefit from the expertise of the firm's attorneys in this area of the law. We frequently counsel business enterprises that are injured by these and cognate practices, and where appropriate bring suit under the antitrust laws to halt the violative conduct and to recover damages sustained thereby. For example, a victim of a price-fixing conspiracy may recover the difference in price between what it paid and what it should have paid for the product. (As an added bonus, damages in this sort of case are tripled under federal law.) A company unfairly excluded from a market may recover the profits on the sales it would have made absent defendant's unlawful conduct. The firm's lawyers also regularly advise its clients on conduct that might violate the antitrust laws, to the end of avoiding entanglement in costly and time-consuming antitrust litigation, while working with them to accomplish their business goals through conduct that will not be challenged under the antitrust laws.

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