Antitrust and Consumer Protection
Competition: Spring 2014, Vol. 23, No. 1
Content
- Chair's Column
- Do First Amendment Principles Limit the Antitrust Agencies' Ability To Prohibit Enforcement of Standards-essential Patents?
- Does the First Amendment Immunize Google's Search Engine Search Results From Government Antitrust Scrutiny?
- Editor's Note
- First Amendment Protection For Search Engine Search Results
- Judges Speak Out: the Make-or-break Moment of Certifying a Class With Judges Marsha Berzon, Virginia Phillips, John Wiley, and Curtis Karnow
- Landmark Civil Price-fixing Verdicts of 2013: Lessons From the Vitamin C and Urethanes Trials With Trial Counsel and Observers William a. Isaacson, Daniel S. Mason, Joseph Goldberg, and Michael Tubach
- Lcd Redux: Follow-on Class Action and Direct Purchaser Litigation From 2012'S Doj Criminal Prosecutions Views from Trial Experts Bruce Simon, Howard Varinsky, and Robert Freitas
- Masthead
- Noerr-pennington: Safeguarding the First Amendment Right To Petition the Government
- Regulation of Companies' Data Security Practices Under the Ftc Act and California Unfair Competition Law
- The Irrelevance of the First Amendment To the Modern Regulation of the Internet
- The Market-participant Exception To State-action Immunity From Antitrust Liability
- The Misapplication of Matsushita's Heightened Summary Judgment Standard
- The Supreme Court In Borough of Duryea V. Guarnieri Signals a Retreat From Pre's Broad Deference To the Right To Petition
- Update On California State Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law and Federal and State Procedural Law
- Trial By Sample: a Post-game, Locker Room Chat Exploring the McAdams V. Monier Trial: a Roundtable With Trial Counsel Jeffrey Cereghino and William Stern
TRIAL BY SAMPLE: A POST-GAME, LOCKER ROOM CHAT EXPLORING THE MCADAMS V. MONIER TRIAL: A ROUNDTABLE With Trial Counsel Jeffrey Cereghino and William Stern
Moderated by Kimberly Kralowec; Edited by Asim Bhansali
The case of McAdams v. Monier went to trial in 2012 as one of the few class action cases under either the Unfair Competition Law or Consumers Legal Remedies Act to reach trial in the past few years. Following an eight-week trial, the jury found for plaintiffs, but returned a damages verdict of $7.4 million rather than the $250 million that the plaintiff sought. The trial court subsequently entered judgment for the defendant despite the verdict, finding the methodology used by plaintiff’s expert to be speculative.
This judgment came after a decade of litigation. Following an original filing in 2003, the case reached the Court of Appeal on certification issues. The Court of Appeal reversed the trial court’s decision not to certify the class, but the defendant appealed to the California Supreme Court. Following its decision in Tobacco II, the California Supreme Court remanded this case to the Court of Appeal to review in view of that decision. The Court of Appeal again decided that class certification was appropriate, and a trial followed.
What follows is a roundtable discussion among trial counsel for plaintiff, Jeffrey Cereghino of Ram, Olson, Cereghino & Kopczynski, and trial counsel for the defendant, William Stern, of Morrison & Foerster. This written roundtable forum has been edited by Asim Bhansali of Keker & Van Nest LLP. The original roundtable was presented at the 2013 Golden State Institute and moderated by Kimberly Kralowec of The Kralowec Law Group.