Antitrust Litigation

Antitrust law is the area of law focused on ensuring lawful commercial competition and is necessary to protect commerce and trade from price fixing, unfair commercial restraints, and the creation of unlawful monopolies. Antitrust law is necessary to safeguard commercial competition and has different regulations on both the federal level, as well as at the individual state antitrust statue level. Illegal monopolies often lead to excessive price increases and complete control over an entire market, giving consumers no options, pretty much forcing consumers to select their business in order to receive a certain good or service. This can lead to hardships for consumers as well as the and businesses and employees that were acquired or pushed out by the larger company by violating anti-trust laws.

In order to successfully address antitrust violations, it is imperative to tackle in a timely fashion. Antitrust schemes often transpire intentionally concealed, and when businesses finally realize anticompetitive business practices have occurred, the window of opportunity to address it under the statute of limitation provisions has passed. As antitrust law allows for very few concessions for late filings of antitrust complaint, it is imperative to seek counsel immediately once unfair business practices are presumed.

Some examples of violations to antitrust laws are:

• Exclusive Dealerships, Territories & Distributorships
• Bid Rigging, Price Fixing, & Unfair Prices or Sale Terms
• Patent Infringement
• Autonomous Refusals to Deal
• Profit Passovers
• Customer Restrictions
• Agreements on Terms of Trade and Tying Arrangements
• Dealer and Franchisee Terminations
• Vulturine Promotion

Both individual business as well as the general market can be victim to antitrust violations. A group boycott is often directed towards only one or very few victims and occurs when two or more persons or entities conspire to restrict the ability of someone from competing. A group boycott is often aimed at a new player who is trying to establish itself in an existing market, with different and often better ideas or ways of delivering goods or services and the existing players feel threatened and orchestrate their combined dominance to lock out the new competition. Group boycotts can be detrimental to all business sizes, but small businesses are often the most vulnerable and it is imperative to act quickly in order to ensure any antitrust violations addressed.

The business trial lawyers at Loftus & Eisenberg are passionate about protecting business owner’s rights to conduct business in a level playing field, have vast experience in consumer protection, unfair competition, antitrust, and class action litigation.