Law firms and legal practice

Bona Law Members Help Lead the 2024 ABA Antitrust Law Section Spring Meeting

March 29, 2024 | Bona Law PC

Authors: Steve Cernak, Kristen Harris, Pat Pascarella, Ruth Glaeser, Luis Blanquez

The American Bar Association Antitrust Law Section’s annual Spring Meeting in Washington DC is April 10-12 this year. Each year, the Spring Meeting has dozens of panels and events and generates numerous receptions — formal and informal — as about 4000 antitrust practitioners and enforcers flock to Washington. It is the place to be for antitrust and consumer protection lawyers and economists — so, of course, Bona Law professionals will play a leading role.

Steve Cernak will be moderating a panel of the Deputy Assistant Attorneys General of the US Department of Justice Antitrust Division on Wednesday morning. As Chair-Elect of the Section, Cernak has helped organize this Spring Meeting and is already hard at work on all the Section’s programming for the Section year starting in August.

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What is a Lanham Act False Advertising Claim and Why Does it Matter for Competition?

April 17, 2021 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

You might have a Lanham Act claim if your competitor is making false statements to promote its products or services in a way that deceives customers and injures you because you lost business, for example, as a result.

Although many people think of the Lanham Act as a trademark statute—and it is—it also allows competitors to sue each other for false advertising.

So the Lanham Act is on the battlefield for competition as competitors often use lawsuits as part of their arsenal to gain whatever advantage they can.

The Lanham Act is particularly interesting because it allows competitor standing when harm is done to consumers, so long as the plaintiff suffered lost profits or something similar because of the false statements.

Indeed, Congress designed the competitor enforcement mechanism because competitors have both the knowledge and motivation to enforce the Lanham Act. The Supreme Court explained this enforcement rationale in its POM Wonderful LLC v. Coca-Cola case, which you can read about here:

“Competitors who manufacture or distribute products have detailed knowledge regarding how consumers rely upon certain sales and marketing strategies. Their awareness of unfair competition practices may be far more immediate and accurate than that of agency rulemakers and regulators.”

Importantly, however, the Supreme Court clarified in its Lexmark decision that the plaintiff need not necessarily be a competitor, so long as they suffered “an injury to a commercial interest in sales or business reputation proximately caused by the defendant’s misrepresentations.” This is an important opening and you can read more about our discussion of the Supreme Court’s Lexmark standing decision here. You might also read this Ninth Circuit decision on the Lanham Act.

The Lanham Act is, however, primarily a statute that competitors use to sue each other. You also see this in antitrust law—of course—and intellectual property law (including trade secret and trademark cases). And, under state law, competitors sue for tortious interference, of some sort, along with state statutes that prohibit false advertising and antitrust. And there are other causes of action, state and federal, that come up in specific circumstances.

For better or worse, business competition often takes a detour to the courthouse and companies use litigation to their advantage. Filing a lawsuit for the sake of filing one, without a meritorious claim, could subject you to actions for malicious prosecution, abuse of process, and even antitrust liability in certain circumstances. But companies with prima facie claims against their competitors often relish the opportunity to carry the market fight to the legal forum. We’ve seen this from both sides, many times, over the years.

Sometimes antitrust lawyers call themselves antitrust and competition lawyers. The reason for that is that in the United States our laws that govern competition are called “Antitrust” laws (because of the unique history of the federal statutes that went after the “Trusts” back in the day). Antitrust used to be “anti-trust.” But here is an important tip: If you add the hyphen to “antitrust,” you will tip off to antitrust lawyers that you aren’t that familiar with the subject. So if you want to seem like an insider, skip the hyphen.

In Europe and much of the rest of the world, by contrast, these law are called, straightforwardly, “Competition” laws. And the lawyers that practice in this area are called Competition Lawyers.

But there is a second great reason for US antitrust lawyers to more accurately describe themselves as antitrust and competition lawyers. That is because when you represent clients that compete in a marketplace, you experience their hard-core focus on competition and, necessarily, their competitors.

You help them manage the rules of competition, with your own tools. Many of those involve antitrust knowledge and experience. But—to really help your clients—you also need to understand and have experience with the other causes of action that come up among and between competitors. And that includes, of course, the Lanham Act.

So—while we can accurately call ourselves antitrust lawyers, we are really antitrust and competition lawyers because we advise clients on the rules of competition generally, which are much broader than simply the antitrust laws. We are soldiers on the legal battlefield of competition. Antitrust laws are great weapons, but they aren’t the only ones.

As sort of a related aside, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I have learned advising clients in antitrust and competition law. Over time, you experience competition in all forms. You see different ways that competitors try to knock each other out of the market, or otherwise take market share. Sometimes this is about competing better, but it is often about competing differently—that is, adjusting your service and product to not only differentiate yourself, but to create a new market altogether.

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What Can Your Friendly Antitrust Lawyer Do for You?

January 2, 2021 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

Some lawyers focus on litigation. Other attorneys spend their time on transactions or mergers & acquisitions. Many lawyers offer some sort of legal counseling. Another group—often in Washington, DC or Brussels—spend their time close to the government, usually either administrative agencies or the legislature. And perhaps the most interesting attorneys try to keep their clients out of jail.

But your friendly antitrust attorneys—the superheroes of lawyers—do all of this. That is part of what makes practicing antitrust so fun. We are here to solve competition problems; whether they arise from transactions, disputes, or the government, we are here to help. Or perhaps you just want some basic advice. We do that too—all the time. We can even help train your employees on antitrust law as part of compliance programs.

Perhaps you are a new attorney, or a law student, and you are considering what area to practice? Try antitrust and competition law. Not only is this arena challenging and in flux—which adds to the excitement—but you also don’t pigeonhole yourself into a particular type of practice. You get to do it all—your job is to understand the essence of markets and competition and to help clients solve competition problems. And in the world of big tech, antitrust is kind of a big deal.

For those of you that aren’t antitrust attorneys, I thought it might be useful if I explained what it is that we do.

Antitrust and Business Litigation

Although much of our litigation is, in fact, antitrust litigation, much of it is not. In the business v. business litigation especially, even in cases that involve an antitrust claim, there are typically several other types of claims that are not antitrust. As an example, we explain here how we see a lot of Lanham Act False Advertising claims in our antitrust and competition practice.

Businesses compete in the marketplace, but they also compete in the courtroom, for better or worse. And when they do, their big weapon is often a federal antitrust claim (with accompanying treble damages and attorneys’ fees), but they may also be armed with other claims, including trade secret statutes, Lanham Act (both false advertising and trademark), intellectual property, tortuous interference (particularly popular in business disputes), unfair competition, unfair and deceptive trade practices, and others.

In many instances, in fact, we will receive a call from a client that thinks they may have an antitrust claim. Perhaps they read this blog post. Sometimes they do, indeed, have a potential antitrust claim. But in other instances, an antitrust claim probably won’t work, but another claim might fit, perhaps a Lanham Act claim for false advertising, or tortuous interference with contract, or some sort of state unfair trade practice claim.

Antitrust lawyers study markets and competition and are the warriors of courtroom competition between competitors. If you have a legal dispute with a competitor, you should call your friendly antitrust attorney.

Antitrust litigation itself is great fun. The cases are usually significant, document heavy, with difficult legal questions and an emphasis on economic testimony. Some of them even involve class actions or multi-district litigation.

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What is Great Legal Writing?

May 21, 2020 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

Great lawyers must write well. But what does that mean? I could give you a list of what you should or shouldn’t do as a legal writer. I think that you might find such an article useful regardless of your skill level because the best writers always strive to improve and the worst writers, well, they need a lot of guidance.

I might write that article one day. But not today. I thought we’d try to go a little deeper than that today.

If you want technical advice, it isn’t hard to find. I highly recommend Bryan Garner’s seminars. I’ve attended many over the years and they are inspirational. And I mean that; I’m not just trying to sound overly cool by telling you how writing seminars inspire me. But he is a great writer turned great speaker who really cares about the written word and you leave the course thinking not only about your writing, but about bettering your writing. You can check out his many books here.

I also recommend Ross Guberman and Legal Writing Pro. I attended his seminar as a young(er) attorney and appreciated how he utilized great legal writers as exemplars of how to write briefs. You might also enjoy his blog on legal writing.

If you are interested in the excruciating details of how to write an appellate or antitrust brief, you might enjoy this article.

I was lucky to have clerked in Minneapolis for Judge James B. Loken of the Federal Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Early in our clerkship, he explained to us that he is a professional writer. At first I was surprised to hear that because I thought of novelists, journalists and others as professional writers, but not judges. But he was write; I mean right.

The appellate judge communicates through writing. Indeed, every official act is a written one. To act effectively, the judge must write well. Clarity, persuasiveness, organization, and plain old storytelling must find their way into the judge’s opinions.

Lawyers have the same responsibility. We are professional writers. My legal career has included both an appellate practice and a writing-heavy litigation and antitrust focus. That is, in my early career in the big cases, I typically found myself in the writing roles, which is not an accident. So I have spent a lot of time pondering the theoretics of legal writing (or at least what makes it good or bad).

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The Underrated Virtue of Changing Your Mind

November 14, 2019 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

At Bona Law, nobody owns any ideas. If I come up with an argument for a brief, it isn’t the Jarod-Bona idea. If a client or a paralegal or a junior attorney or my son tells me that the strategy that I have set on a complex antitrust case has a flaw, he or she is not criticizing my idea or strategy.

When someone owns an idea they have a stake in defending it, even if new or different ideas or new information makes the old idea not worth supporting. If you want to optimize strategy, arguments, or anything else when you represent a client, you can’t cling to ideas or theories that no longer represent the best thinking.

That is why at Bona Law, I strongly encourage and remind everyone to criticize current ideas and to present new ones. Each person has a unique life experience, perspective, and focus, so anyone on the team can improve any aspect of a case, from the grammar, formatting, or punctuation of a sentence, to the overall strategy of a series of complex antitrust actions. Each person is welcome to support or criticize any idea because none of us owns any of them.

That approach is also important because we all have blind spots such that someone else’s fresh perspective will see a large smudge that you might miss on a paper that you have been staring at all day. That is part of why I recommend that you hire a separate appellate attorney.

But changing your mind isn’t just about a fresh perspective to something you may have missed, though that is significant. Sometimes new information should cause you to rethink your initial idea, even if your convictions were firm. Even better, with time you should develop greater knowledge, wisdom, and insight. You should also be exposed to the perspectives of more people, whether through actual interaction, literature, podcasts, biographies, and everything else.

Anyone that clings to a past idea when new information and their own development makes that idea foolish is, in fact, a fool.

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How this Antitrust Lawyer Counsels Clients on Risk in the Business World

August 25, 2019 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

You may not realize this, but a lot of people don’t like lawyers. We even have our own genre of comedy that predates Shakespeare: lawyer jokes. Here is a common example: What do you call 1000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!

When you heard that joke for the first time, you probably laughed and laughed, shook your head and said, “funny because it’s true.”

So why do people dislike lawyers? To save you time, I’ll focus on one reason and leave the rest for others: Because lawyers spoil the fun by saying “no.”

This reason for not liking lawyers, of course, comes from the business context where companies consult either in-house lawyers or outside counsel about how or whether to proceed on a project or opportunity.

It is the lawyer’s job and duty to risk ruining the party. The business and sales people look at the opportunity and see upside: revenues, more market share, perhaps an important merger or acquisition.

It is the lawyer that must look at the opportunity to see the downside risks: the lawsuits, the disputes, the government reactions or investigations, the response from competitors. Then, oftentimes, the lawyer says “no.” The music stops and people go back to their offices, sometimes frustrated and angry, perhaps thinking that the lawyer should be on the bottom of the ocean. The lawyer is the bad guy, even if he or she is just doing his or her job.

But this isn’t an article defending lawyers.

To be honest, most lawyers aren’t great, or sometimes even good. The same is true of most people in any profession. Only in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, Minnesota is everyone above average (of course, he was talking about the children, but you get the point). And many criticisms about lawyers apply to many of members of this profession, including the fact that they just ruin the party by saying “no” all the time.

I think that the lawyer that just says “no” is a lazy lawyer that offers very little value to his or her client. Sometimes the lawyer must say “no,” but in most instances, there should be more and I don’t just mean justifications for the denial.

Of course, a client might come up to a lawyer and say the following: “As you know, we compete in a market with four main players. It seems silly that we spend so much time trying to undercut each other on price and so many resources trying to come out with new features to our product. Our adversaries may lack social grace, they may smell bad, and they certainly aren’t good looking, but they aren’t bad people. We could all make more money if we could just get together, have a meeting, set the price we are all going to charge, maybe divide up the customer base, probably by geography, and vote on features to add to our products.”

An antitrust attorney that hears this from a client, must say “NO,” in all caps, like they are yelling. Of course, after that, they better work on education through antitrust compliance counseling and training. Time to put together an antitrust compliance policy. The Department of Justice would certainly appreciate a strong antitrust compliance policy.

But in most instances—even where the client’s idea creates risk—a simple “no” is not the right approach, at least from a good antitrust attorney.

The scenario I described above—involving price fixing and market allocation (per se antitrust violations)—is a rare example of a situation where the antitrust laws are mostly clear.

In most instances, either the law or the application of law is not straightforward enough to entirely preclude the client’s objective. For example, the question of what is exclusionary conduct under Section 2 of the Sherman Act (Monopolization) is not an easy one to answer. There is still great debate among the courts, academics, and economists. Similar issues can arise if you are trying to determine if an exclusive dealing agreement violates the antitrust laws: Sometimes the answer isn’t clear.

Advising Business Clients on Antitrust Risks

I can’t speak for all antitrust attorneys, but here is how I handle counseling clients on antitrust risks:

First, I understand that the perspective of a business is different than the perspective of the typical lawyer.

The attorney, especially the litigator, has grown up (professionally) in a world where they win or lose a motion or case and where something is or isn’t illegal under the law. There are, of course, grey areas, but a young attorney that receives a research project, for example, is tasked with finding the “answer.” And courts have to give decisions on “the law” in such a way that suggests there is an answer, even when the reality is that it could have gone either way. But opinions rarely say that—when they do, it is a credit to the judge.

Businesses, however, make calculated judgments based upon risk, reward, and resources. Opening another factory has obvious risks and rewards and takes resources. The business executive tries to evaluate the risks, judge the potential upside, and compare both of those to the resources necessary to open the factory.

If you tell the business to not open the factory because there are “risks,” you aren’t helping it. The business executive will just stare at you like you are some sort of fool. Of course there are risks; the skill in running a business is to evaluate those risks and incorporate them into decisionmaking.

I understand this perspective even more clearly now, having run Bona Law for several years. Indeed, my bio now finally reflects that understanding.

Let’s apply this point to antitrust counseling: If a client comes to me with an opportunity, a project, or even a problem, it does the business little good for me to just say “no, there are risks.” That’s the lazy approach, in my view.

My value as the antitrust attorney in that situation is to help the client fully understand the risk. That is, I try to help the client appreciate the likelihood of the risk coming to fruition and the consequences of the risk, if it hits. And, in fact, the counseling is usually more complicated because there are often multiple risks, each with their own structure of probability and harm.

I do this because this is how businesses make decisions: They incorporate risk into the information that they have and make the best call they can.

Second, I work with the client to come up with options with similar rewards or upsides, but less antitrust risk—or some more preferable sliding scale of the risks and rewards.

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Legal Analytics for Antitrust Litigation: Sizing Up the Antitrust Landscape

April 25, 2019 | justia.admin

Author: Rachel Bailey, Legal Data Expert, Lex Machina

Data analytics is big business right now. Many types of businesses are using analytics to become more competitive and efficient. It’s no longer just “Moneyball” in sports, but styling analytics in retail, adaptive learning analytics in education and – you guessed it – litigation analytics in the legal sector.

While there are a variety of analytics purveyors in the legal space, one vendor recently released a report specifically on antitrust litigation. Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, crawls PACER data and cleans and structures it to help users gain insights – and strategic advantage – in federal antitrust litigation.

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Bona Law would like to Add a New Antitrust Attorney in either California or New York

March 31, 2019 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

Our boutique antitrust law firm has a lot of work right now and we expect this to continue and even increase. You may have seen the announcement about our new antitrust (monopolization) and Lanham Act lawsuit in Colorado federal court. And that is just one of many cases, matters, and projects we have on our plate right now.

Fortunately, we have a strong team that can handle our workload; and we can easily expand quickly to add temporary team members with big-firm credentials as needed (which we have done). We also work with various third-party providers to assist with document review and other litigation-related tasks so we can fully leverage our attorney time.

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Three Components of Every Effective Appellate Argument

November 11, 2018 | Bona Law PC

Author: Jarod Bona

This website is called The Antitrust Attorney Blog, not the Appellate Attorney Blog. But I have combined an appellate practice with my antitrust practice my entire legal career and we do a lot of appellate work at Bona Law. So sometimes we address appellate, writing, and briefing issues here.

I previously wrote about why you should hire an appellate lawyer.

And mused about what is great legal writing.

Here is an article about the details of how to actually prepare for and write a significant appellate or antitrust brief.

In this article, I discuss the three foundations for every argument on appeal. These can also apply to trial-level arguments, but at the appellate level you can usually build a more complete argument, so I will use the appellate brief as the model.

Of course, what I like about antitrust is that the cases tend to be more complex, which usually invites deeper arguments, even at the trial level (similar to an appellate brief).

My arguments incorporate these three components.

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Antitrust and Competition Law is Global: Bona Law Expands Its International Resources through IR Global

November 5, 2018 | Bona Law PC

Author: Luis Blanquez

Antitrust and competition law is a global issue. Markets that could be national are often global instead (because if they aren’t naturally local, there usually isn’t reason to stop at a country’s borders).

Bona Law embraces this international reality. That is part of what attracted me to the firm upon my arrival in the United States after 15 years of practicing antitrust and competition law in Europe. We can help clients all over the world with US and EU antitrust issues.

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