Antitrust News: New FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra Calls Out Repeat Offenders for Harsher Penalties

May 19, 2018 | Bona Law PC

As you may have heard, the Senate recently approved a new slate of FTC Commissioners. Among them is new Commissioner Rohit Chopra, who is a former assistant director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former advisor to the Secretary of Education.

Commissioner Chopra was sworn in on May 2, 2018 and quickly announced one of his early priorities: On May 14, 2018, he issued a public memorandum to the other FTC Commissioners and the FTC Staff describing how he believes the FTC should handle repeat offenders of FTC violations.

Let’s dig into this a little bit.

Commissioner Chopra describes the problem of corporate recidivism as generally resulting from significant management dysfunction, which requires “serious remedies that address the underlying issues.”

After describing several non-antitrust examples of this corporate recidivism, particularly involving large financial institutions, Commissioner Chopra points out, bluntly, that “FTC orders are not suggestions.” He says that—“to deter violations and maintain [the FTC’s] credibility as law enforcers”—the FTC “should carefully consider ways to build on its existing enforcement regime to make clear to market participants that our orders are to be taken seriously.”

For flagrant violators of district court orders, he believes that the agency should consider “contempt proceedings, referral to criminal authorities, and remedial injunctive relief.” Companies that violate FTC administrative orders should face additional injunctive relief and meaningful civil penalties.

Notably, Commissioner Chopra expresses a desire to go after individual executives that participate in FTC order violations, even if those individuals weren’t named in the original orders. So if a company is subject to an FTC order and violates that order, Commissioner Chopra would like to target the people that created the violation.

Structural Remedies Following Order Violations and an Important Caution

Finally, in what I believe is the most newsworthy part of this memorandum, Commissioner Chopra describes the structural remedies that he believes the FTC should explore for FTC-order violators.

His purpose in proposing these remedies is to address “the true causes of noncompliance.” Commissioner Chopra believes that certain companies may “engage in risky business practices to demonstrate to investors and capital markets that they are meeting or surpassing expectations for earnings and growth.” He also believes that “executive compensation practices might inadvertently create incentives for practices that might harm consumers or competition.”

We are, of course, treading on dangerous territory here. Businesses necessarily take risk—that is a feature not a bug. What are “risky business practices”? That is for the market—in its brutal truth and honesty—to reveal. It isn’t up to a government official or entity, without Skin in the Game, to make these determinations.

That isn’t to say that the FTC shouldn’t enforce antitrust, competition, and consumer protection laws. Nor is it to say that the FTC shouldn’t raise the penalties for repeat offenders. But protection of competition moves silently and dangerously to market distortion and harm when it decides that it is smarter than the market itself.

Those that enforce the antitrust laws with government power must do so humbly for the line between removing the barriers to competition and, frankly, screwing-up competition is a fine one that we rarely see clearly. It is best that those with power stay firmly on one side, so they don’t cross this line.

With those cautions, here are the structural remedies that Commissioner Chopra proposes the FTC consider invoking in response to order violations:

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Antitrust News: FTC Issues Significant State Action Immunity Decision in Louisiana Real Estate Appraisers Case

April 10, 2018 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

On April 10, 2018—the eve of my panel on state action immunity issues at the ABA Antitrust Spring Meeting in DC, the FTC granted, in essence, partial summary judgment against the Louisiana Real Estate Appraisers Board on state action immunity. You can read the FTC decision—hot off the press—right here.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here as you can read the decision, but here is short summary:

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Lithium Ion Batteries, Indirect Purchaser Antitrust Class Actions, and the Reality of Pricing

March 15, 2018 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

It isn’t easy to be an indirect purchaser antitrust class action plaintiff.

Not only do you have to satisfy the difficult standards for class certification (discussed here), but you also have to prove that the direct purchasers passed on an overcharge from defendants’ alleged anticompetitive conduct.

Before we go further, let’s talk about how direct purchasers and indirect purchasers fit into antitrust class action cases.

Direct Purchasers, Indirect Purchasers, Class Actions, and Overcharges

The most common type of antitrust class actions involve allegations of price-fixing or some other per se antitrust violation that leads to higher prices than the but-for world without the anticompetitive conduct. The increase in prices from the antitrust violation is called the overcharge.

The “overcharge,” of course, isn’t real—it is a number that one or more economists create after combining equations with lots of data and a bunch of assumptions that may or may not be accurate. Everyone does their best and a judge or jury has to sort through it and try to figure out what is right.

Anyway, a “direct purchaser” is a person or entity that purchased products or services from one or more defendants that were accused of violating the antitrust laws. They usually have standing to sue under the federal antitrust laws because, if the allegations are true, they paid higher amounts than they should have for their purchase.

But sometimes these direct purchasers are not end users of the product. Instead, they may be, for example, distributors or retailers that purchaser the product from defendants and resell it to someone else. That someone else is what is called an “indirect purchaser.”

For reasons I won’t get into now, indirect purchasers usually don’t have standing to sue for damages under the federal antitrust laws (Illinois Brick). But many states allow indirect purchasers to obtain antitrust damages under their state antitrust laws.

So when something happens and there is an antitrust blizzard of antitrust complaints filed throughout the country, direct purchasers will sue under the federal antitrust laws and indirect purchasers will sue—also in federal court—under state antitrust laws for damages. (They may also sue for injunctive relief under federal antitrust law).

In addition to winning the antitrust lawsuit, class action plaintiffs must also achieve class certification. And if indirect purchasers want any damages, they have to show that the direct purchasers paid an overcharge resulting from defendants’ anticompetitive conduct and passed some or all of that overcharge to the indirect purchasers.

One final point, I have spent my career on the defendant side of antitrust class actions and, as of the date of this article, Bona Law is representing a defendant in the In re Capacitors Antitrust Litigation. So please note any potential biases.

Court Denies Renewed Class Action Certification Motion for In re Lithium Ion Batteries Antitrust Litigation

The background and introduction was to tell you about the Court’s recent decision in the Lithium Ion Batteries antitrust class action case. In April 2017, we wrote about the Court’s initial class certification denial without prejudice, which meant that plaintiffs could renew their class certification motion once they fixed the identified problems in the motions and expert reports.

Well, the indirect purchasers renewed their motion for class certification and the Court again rejected it. The Court also granted defendants’ motion to strike plaintiffs’ supplemental expert report. You can read the Court’s order here.

To support plaintiffs’ renewed motion for class certification, indirect purchasers submitted a supplemental expert report that attempted to address issues that led to the Court’s last class-certification rejection: updated analysis to address packer pass-through issue, added new data from third parties and new documentary evidence about pricing coordination, and attempted to address the effects of rebates, bundles, discounts, and focal point pricing on pass-through and damages.

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Good News! Concurrences Extends Voting for the 2018 Antitrust Writing Awards Through February 16

February 12, 2018 | Bona Law PC

Do you want to learn about antitrust? If so, now is a great time to do so. Concurrences, an international antitrust website with an outstanding reputation, is accepting votes for their 2018 Antitrust Writing Awards, which will be announced at the Awards Gala Dinner on April 10, 2018 (right before the ABA Antitrust Spring Meeting, where you may find me on a panel).

I haven’t been to the Awards Gala Dinner, but I can only assume it is similar to the Oscars, if the Oscars were run by antitrust lawyers. We can pause for a moment while you try to picture what that might entail.

Back to the Antitrust Writing Awards: A jury of distinguished antitrust experts selected articles from 2017 in several categories: Best Academic Articles, Best Business Articles, Best Soft Law, and Best Newsletters. Within each category are articles in several substantive antitrust and competition areas.

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Antitrust-Style Analysis in Patent Law

January 30, 2018 | Bona Law PC

Author: Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Associate Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Engineering, Texas A&M University.

This guest post is based upon Professor Vishnubhakat’s innovative new paper applying antitrust concepts to patent law, which is now published in the Seton Hall Law Review: “The Antitrusting of Patentability”

Courts facing difficult questions of patent validity are increasingly turning to a form of decision-making that has long been familiar to antitrust lawyers: using per se analysis rather than the rule of reason. In this post, I will discuss the analytical origins of this trend, fresh empirical data on how it is emerging, and some thoughts for improvement.

The Patent-Antitrust Interface

To begin, it is worth noting the very fact that antitrust law and patent law are intersecting so directly. The complexity and specialization of these fields can often stand in the way of dialogue between them, though the need for such dialogue is plain. One of antitrust law’s main concerns is fostering competition and promoting economic efficiency. Meanwhile, patent rights by design restrict competition and efficiency in the short run. A patent owner can exclude others from quintessentially economic activities: making, using, selling, offering, and importing the patented invention.

This is meant to produce gains for inventor and society alike, but on different timelines. Market power and the ability to charge higher prices are today’s reward for the patent owner in return for developing the invention in the first place. Society’s reward comes tomorrow, when the patent expires and the technical know-how becomes freely available to make and sell, to use in follow-on innovation, and so on. Another important reward to society is the credible incentive to future would-be innovators that their efforts, too, will enjoy a similar benefit.

Theoretically, this tradeoff between static current losses to competition and efficiency in favor of dynamic future gains could be made entirely within patent law itself. However, antitrust has much to say on these systemic choices, too, and the proper treatment of so-called “patent monopolies” has been a source of perennial debate and even tension in the law since the 19th century.

**The Origins of Per Se Analysis in Patent Law**

In this longstanding debate, the use of per se-style analysis in patent law is a recent development aimed at solving a specific problem. Inventions are evaluated, and patents are granted, by Patent Office examiners with expertise in the relevant technology. Federal judges and juries who later confront these patents in litigation generally have no such expertise, but they must frequently decide whether a patent is valid. In doing so, they must pass judgment on whether an expert agency—one that deals every day with the law and the science of patents—got it wrong.

Under the best of circumstances, this is intimidating. Making this decision accurately is costly and time-consuming, even with compelling stories from attorneys and authoritative opinions from expert witnesses. If one could dispense with the thorny question of patent validity early in litigation, things would be simpler.

One straightforward way to front-loading an issue, of course, is to decide it as a matter of law without delving much into idiosyncratic facts. This is where per se analysis of patent validity begins. Of the major requirements for a patent to be granted—and for a granted patent to be found valid—most require a good deal of factual detail about the state of the art and what people trained in that art knew at the time of the invention. But one does not: the threshold question of the invention is even patent-eligible subject matter. This is primarily a legal question, and so the subject matter eligibility doctrine is a good candidate for reducing the decision costs associated with determining patent validity.

**How the Per Se Analysis of Patent Validity Actually Works**

The way it works, in essence, is that a court applies the subject matter eligibility doctrine to find a patent invalid rather than reaching the same conclusion through other, more fact-intensive doctrines. Patent lawyers tend to think of the different patentability requirements as separate hurdles to be cleared, but it turns out that these requirements reflect similar, overlapping concerns.

To be patentable, an invention must be useful and new as compared to the prior state of knowledge. It must be nonobvious, which means it must embody more than trivial combinations or extensions of existing inventions or pieces of knowledge. These requirements are intended to ensure that an invention is innovative enough to merit a patent.

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The US Supreme Court Should Affirm the Ninth Circuit in SolarCity: State-Action-Immunity Defendants Have No Right to an Immediate Appeal

December 13, 2017 | Bona Law PC

Author: Aaron Gott

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari to decide a circuit split on an important procedural question concerning the state-action immunity to the federal antitrust laws: whether a decision denying the state-action immunity is immediately appealable or must await a final decision just like most issues raised on a motion to dismiss.

The case, SolarCity Corporation v. Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, is about a power company that changed its rate structure to make it less appealing for consumers to switch to solar power. Power companies are typically quasi-natural monopolies because of the way power is delivered—through a massive infrastructure of physical lines.

Update: The parties reached a settlement and filed a stipulated dismissal dated March 20, 2018. So the US Supreme Court will not hear this case.

But new technology is changing that: people can generate electricity straight from the sun by installing panels on their roofs, and soon it will be more cost effective to install batteries to hold that power for when it is needed than to continue paying the power company. In places like Southern California, where the price of peak electricity is more than four times the national average, solar power is a no-brainer.

It comes as no surprise that some power companies are using their incumbency to slow the disruption of this innovative technology. SolarCity (now Tesla, Inc.) sued an Arizona power district for attempting to maintain its monopoly over the supply of electrical power in its territory, alleging that the power district created new fees that penalize solar customers, which ultimately had its intended effect: solar retailers received 96% fewer applications for new solar systems among customers in the power district after the new rates took effect.

The power district moved to dismiss, arguing that it is immune from the federal antitrust laws under the state-action immunity. The district court denied the motion because the power district had not met its burden of showing that it acted pursuant to a clearly articulated state policy to displace competition. The power district sought an order certifying the denial for interlocutory appeal, which was also denied. Nevertheless, the power district immediately appealed to the Ninth Circuit, arguing that a denial of the state-action immunity should be immediately appealable under the collateral order doctrine.

Before we dive into the Ninth Circuit decision, let’s discuss some of these terms.

The Collateral Order Doctrine

The collateral order doctrine is an exception to the general rule that the federal courts of appeal have jurisdiction to hear only appeals of “final orders” from the district courts. The exception is narrow and must be strictly applied.

A collateral order is appealable immediately if it meets three requirements: first, the order being appealed must be conclusive. Second, it must address a question that is separate from the merits of the case. Third, it must raise “some particular value of a high order” and evade effective review if not considered immediately.

With these requirements, there are only a few categories of decisions that meet the collateral order doctrine, and they are all “immunities”: Eleventh Amendment immunity, absolute immunity, qualified immunity, foreign and tribal sovereign immunity. Given this, it might seem that the state-action “immunity” also fits. But it isn’t quite that simple because the state-action immunity isn’t actually an immunity, but a judicially recognized exemption.

What Is An Immunity?

Read broadly, an immunity could mean many different things. It could mean immunity from suit, immunity from liability, or even just immunity from money damages.

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Antitrust News: US Supreme Court Accepts Review of SolarCity Antitrust Case on State-Action Immunity and Collateral Order Doctrine

December 3, 2017 | Bona Law PC

For the third time in recent years, the US Supreme Court decided to review an antitrust case involving state-action immunity.

Unlike the first two cases, however, the primary issue in this case is procedural: The petition requesting review fairly described the issue as “Whether orders denying state-action immunity to public entities are immediately appealable under the collateral-order doctrine.”

The case at issue is a Ninth Circuit case called SolarCity Corporation v. Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District. SolarCity, of course, is now a unit of Elon Musk’s Tesla.

You can read our more complete analysis of the upcoming SolarCity case here.

Update: The parties reached a settlement and jointly dismissed the case from the US Supreme Court.

The substantive case underneath the procedural issue involves a monopolization lawsuit by SolarCity against a public entity power company in Arizona, which is the only supplier in that area of traditional electrical power.

Here is what they did: SolarCity, like other solar-energy-panel companies, was having success in selling and leasing rooftop solar panels to customers, especially in sunshine places like Arizona (and Southern California, of course). Instead of viewing the move toward solar power as good for the environment and peoples’ pocketbooks, the power company—a public entity—viewed it as a threat. And, like many government entities that view private enterprise as a threat to their budgets and influence, the power district changed the rules.

That is, the power company changed the pricing structure so customers that acquire power from their own system—a solar-panel system, for example—must pay a prohibitively large penalty. The government entity’s rule change had its intended effect: SolarCity received ninety-six percent fewer applications for new solar-panel systems in that territory.

This is, of course, one of the grossest forms of government abuse and a disgrace to competition. It is also one of the reasons why Luke Wake of the NFIB Small Business Legal Center and I argued both as an amicus in Phoebe Putney and in a law review article that the Supreme Court should adopt a market-participant exception to state-action immunity. If a government entity is a commercial participant in a market, it shouldn’t be immunized from cheating in that market.

Bona Law currently has another case pending in the Ninth Circuit in which government entities that compete in the market violated antitrust laws and are using the shield of state-action immunity to try to get away with it.

The Collateral Order Doctrine

In the SolarCity case, the trial court rejected state-action immunity at the motion-to-dismiss stage. Typically, a defendant that loses a motion to dismiss cannot appeal the issues until later in the case, sometimes after trial. The plaintiff gets to take a shot at proving its case.

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Antitrust News: DOJ Antitrust Will Try to Speed Merger Reviews

November 18, 2017 | Bona Law PC

Antitrust News is a new feature at The Antitrust Attorney Blog. We will periodically report on and address new developments in the antitrust world, from FTC or DOJ guidance to important court decisions to relevant legislative developments to worldwide antitrust issues.

Although some of our prior articles involve antitrust developments, most of these posts consist of content that is less timely and more evergreen. Our intent is to help our readers by describing Antitrust News through the filter of our antitrust expertise.

On November 16, 2017 in Washington, DC, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Donald G. Kempf, Jr. made news about antitrust merger review at the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Fall Forum.

Kempf said—simply—that the DOJ will try to shorten the time it takes it to review mergers for antitrust and competition issues. In 2011, the average merger took just over 7 months to review. In 2016, the review time increased to 11.6 months on average.

That is unacceptable. Companies that want to merge should not have to wait almost full year to do so. A lot can happen in a year, particularly now where technology and low entry barriers mean that entire markets often change in a short period of time.

How did the excess delays happen?

To explain, let’s back up and explain—briefly—how an antitrust merger review works:

The merging parties begin by completing what is called a Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) filing. Either the DOJ or FTC has 30 days to decide whether to issue what is called a second request. If one of the antitrust agencies thinks that there could be genuine competition issues for the merger, they may issue this second request, which opens up a heavy set of fact-finding, including document production.

At some point, the antitrust agencies may either approve the merger, reach an agreement with the parties to approve the merger with certain requirements (like selling assets) or (in the case of the DOJ) to seek a preliminary injunction stopping the merger.

According to Kempf, over time the second request period increased in scope and complexity and the preliminary injunction hearings became mini-trials. Indeed, they often have the same effect as a trial on the merger because if the DOJ wins, the parties often abandon the merger. If the DOJ loses, it often halts the challenge.

Kempf went on to articulate why shortening merger review time is so important. His best line was that “delaying competitive mergers is anticompetitive, and that’s not the business the Antitrust Division wants to be in. Just the opposite.”

He offered five suggestions to shorten antitrust merger reviews: Continue reading →

How Do I File My Antitrust Complaint in the European Union? An Example from the Intel Case

November 11, 2017 | Bona Law PC

Author: Luis Blanquez

As a US company doing business internationally, you might wonder what are the legal rules and procedures currently in place in the European Union to file an antitrust complaint.

First, you should understand that The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) is based on the existence of a single market with free movement of goods and services throughout the European Union. The antitrust rules included in the TFEU, such as those against anti-competitive agreements, abuses of dominant position, certain problematic mergers and state aid, are essential to achieve that free movement.

Second, an important distinction from US antitrust law is that EU antitrust law is mainly enforced by public authorities: by the European Commission at EU level, and by national competition authorities (NCAs) at national level.

Third, EU antitrust law is also enforced—to a lesser extent—through ordinary litigation before the appropriate national courts of each Member State.

Last but not least, we shouldn’t forget that each Member State within the EU has also its own domestic antitrust rules, often mirroring EU rules, but sometimes with important procedural and substantive differences.

How the different antitrust laws are applied in the EU between NCAs, the European Commission and national courts, deserves an independent post on its own. For now, however, just keep in mind that as a plaintiff, you could also file an antitrust complaint in the EU before a national court.

In the meantime, if you want to know more about this issue, please see: (i) Council Regulation (EC) No 1/2003 on the implementation of the rules on competition, (ii) Commission Notice on the co-operation between the Commission and the courts of the EU Member States in the application of Articles 81 and 82 EC (See more information here), and (iii) Notice on Cooperation within the network of competition authorities in the European Competition Network (See more information here).

Let’s return to our discussion on the application of EU antitrust rules by the European Commission. In the European Union, the Directorate General for Competition of the European Commission (“the Commission”), together with NCAs, directly enforces EU competition rules, Articles 101-109 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The two most important articles, for the purpose of this post, are articles 101 and 102 TFEU.

Article 101 of the Treaty prohibits agreements between two or more independent market operators that restrict competition. It covers: (i) horizontal agreements between actual or potential competitors operating at the same level of the supply chain; (ii) and vertical agreements, between firms operating at different levels, such as an agreement between a manufacturer and its distributor.

Article 102 of the Treaty prohibits dominant firms from abusing that position, for example, by charging unfair prices, by limiting production, or by refusing to innovate to the prejudice of consumers.

HOW DOES AN ANTITRUST CASE START IN THE EU?

The investigation

For Article 101 TFEU cases, the Commission and NCAs have important investigative powers under Regulation 1/2003.

The initiation of a Commission investigation might be the result of: (i) the Commission (or an NCA) launching an inquiry of its own initiative; (ii) a third party with information who approaches the Commission, such as a competitor or customer, (iii) a party to a cartel (or anti-competitive agreement) acting as a whistleblower under the existing leniency program, or (iv) when an NCA refers a case with a cross border element to the Commission through the ECN network.

Under Article 102, a case can originate either upon receipt of a complaint or through the opening of an investigation at the commission’s initiative.

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Top Antitrust Attorney Steven Levitsky Leaves DLA Piper to Open Bona Law’s New York Office

October 22, 2017 | Bona Law PC

We are ecstatic that Steve Levitsky agreed to join us in New York. It isn’t every day that an antitrust attorney of Steve’s caliber becomes available, let alone fits so perfectly into a law firm’s approach, culture, and plans. But that is the happy situation in which we find ourselves.

You can read our press release about the move here.

As you can tell, I am very excited about this next chapter in Bona Law’s history. As you can see, we now have two offices: La Jolla, California and New York, New York.

Bona Law is an antitrust boutique firm. Our client base has been worldwide for quite some time and we have had cases and other matters all over the country. So the move to add a New York office doesn’t change our focus: We have always been a national antitrust boutique firm.

But I think opening our New York office signals to the marketplace more directly that we are a national law firm that competes with biglaw for antitrust. And adding Steve to our team—with his decades of big firm antitrust experience and worldwide client base—confirms our place.

Steve Levitsky’s antitrust experience includes the big three of litigation, antitrust counseling, and antitrust merger work. But what is even more exciting for us is that Steve is particularly known for his antitrust merger expertise, which is an area in which I have much less experience.

Over the last few years, I have heard repeatedly that many companies that have an HSR filing or other antitrust merger issues are frustrated that they don’t options other than big law firms. Well, now they do: Steve has managed the antitrust side of countless complex merger transactions, domestic and global—many of them worth over $10 billion.

So if you are a corporate attorney or business with antitrust merger or acquisition issues, you should contact Steve.

Steve has such an impressive background that he would, frankly, fit in at any law firm. He would substantially raise the average quality of the attorneys no matter where he would have gone. Our traditional press release and website article goes into his background, so I am not going to repeat it here.

I enjoy writing articles for The Antitrust Attorney Blog because it allows greater flexibility in what I tell you. I try to offer some of the informal truths relating to antitrust and law practice that, although vitally important, are not usually discussed so straightforwardly.

So, obviously, adding Steve to our team is a huge deal because he is a great lawyer. But my excitement about this move goes well beyond that obvious point.

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