Antitrust Litigation

Our client, a large seafood processor, was accused of an antitrust conspiracy to fix the price of seafood products in a $500 million class action lawsuit brought by commercial fishermen.  Plaintiffs relied on the similarity of prices for seafood products up and down the west coast as evidence of a price-fixing conspiracy.  We took a different approach.  We learned the industry, spoke with fishermen and processors and analyzed data from a database that identified every catch up and down the west coast.  What we learned was that the market was highly competitive but that the competition was based more on volume than price.  The most competitive fishermen, when paired with a processor that could purchase and process large volumes of …