Airlines Hit With Broad Antitrust Suit Over Price Info Exchange

By Rachel Riley

Major airlines including Delta, United, American, Alaska, JetBlue and Southwest have kept airfares high by sharing proprietary dynamic pricing information through a revamped data hub operated by Airline Tariff Publishing Co., two ticket buyers claim in a proposed class action filed in Washington federal court Wednesday.

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Albertsons, Safeway Owe Wash. $900M Over Opioid Diversion

By Ben Adlin

Albertsons and its Safeway subsidiary must pay $900 million for helping fuel Washington state's overdose crisis by failing for years to prevent the diversion of opioid drugs, a Seattle judge ruled Thursday, finding that the pharmacy chains regularly failed to follow their own policies aimed at ensuring prescriptions were legitimate.

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FTC Claims Amazon Inflated Ad Auction Prices By 250%

By Dorothy Atkins

The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states have revealed new allegations against Amazon in their sprawling antitrust fight in Washington federal court over online search advertising auctions, including new details alleging Amazon secretly raised advertising prices by as much as 250% to increase its revenue by $87 million worldwide.

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LDS Church Seeks To Exit Sex Abuse Survivors' Lawsuit

By Ben Adlin

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has urged a Washington federal court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the church of enabling sexual abuse by a man who previously pled guilty to raping his daughter, arguing that David Herget's crimes against the plaintiffs were unforeseeable and that the church had no duty to protect them.

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Garmin Wants Out Of Lawsuit Over Wash. Plane Crash Deaths

By Rachel Riley

Garmin is seeking to exit a lawsuit blaming faulty aircraft systems for a deadly 2022 Cessna test flight, telling a Washington state judge Wednesday that the victims' families have not shown the court has jurisdiction over their claims against the Kansas-based GPS giant.

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Feds Say Union, Groups Can't Stop Wash. Ballot Demands

By MJ Koo

President Donald Trump's administration urged a Washington federal court not to block federal officials from asking the state to set aside ballots cast by suspected noncitizens, arguing that a union and two voter advocacy groups challenging the effort have not been harmed because the state has already declined the request.

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Home Depot, Others Fight Bid To Merge Tariff Refund Suits

By Jack McLoone

Home Depot said it opposed combining every proposed customer class action over increased costs from tariffs into multidistrict litigation, claiming there are too many economic differences between the suits. 

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Consumers Drop Cambridge Management Data Breach Suit

By Isaac Monterose

A proposed class of consumers has decided to dismiss its data breach claims against property manager Cambridge Management Inc. without prejudice, according to a court notice filed in Washington federal court.

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Live Nation Cites 2nd Circ. Eyewear Ruling In Fighting Verdict

By Dorothy Atkins

Live Nation has told a New York federal judge that the Second Circuit's recent EssilorLuxottica ruling "bears on the market-definition issues" raised in Live Nation's post-trial motions challenging its antitrust trial loss, while enforcing states argued that the Ninth Circuit's recent NFL Sunday Ticket ruling reversal backs their trial win.

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DOJ Can't Tie State Grants To Immigration Enforcement

By Rae Ann Varona

A Rhode Island federal judge has granted a coalition of states' bid to permanently bar the Trump administration from conditioning federal public safety grants on the states' cooperation with the administration's immigration enforcement priorities, vacating the funding conditions as unlawful.

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Analysis

New Tech, Diluted Noncompetes Drive Up Trade Secret Cases

By Elliot Weld

Artificial intelligence tools are making it easier for employees to take off with valuable trade secrets when they switch employers, while noncompete agreements are becoming more difficult to enforce, a combination that is spurring an increase in trade secret cases, experts told Law360.

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Brief

Wash. To Pay $73K In Fees Under Pretrial-Exam-Delay Deal

By Ganesh Setty

Washington state must pay plaintiffs' counsel roughly $73,000 in attorney fees and costs in a long-running case over its treatment of pretrial detainees in criminal proceedings, a Washington federal judge has ruled.

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9th Circ. Says Lending Co. Can't Arbitrate In Snowflake MDL

By Sydney Price

The Ninth Circuit ruled that online consumer lending platform LendingTree and an insurance comparison subsidiary cannot compel arbitration of a cybersecurity suit within multidistrict litigation over a breach of data held by cloud storage company Snowflake since the websites' design elements prevented "mutual assent" to their terms.

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How Cos. Should Prepare For Democratic Oversight

Companies should begin preparing now for a new, Democratic-majority Congress — understanding how the oversight landscape has changed in recent years and monitoring leadership elections, new rules and potential select committees, say attorneys at Wiley.

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Justices' Intel Ruling Could Aid 401(k) Alternative Asset Push

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's recent oral arguments in Anderson v. Intel, a decision favoring Intel over a prudence claim against fiduciaries based on underperformance by comparing two funds that aren't meaningfully similar would undercut the most common litigation theory against including alternative investments in 401(k) plans, say attorneys at Simpson Thacher.

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Series

Open-Water Swimming Makes Me A Better Lawyer

Swimming long distances in open waters is not necessarily an escape from my intellectual property practice, but a complementary discipline that similarly rewards sustained attention, intellectual curiosity, resilience and the ability to pursue a distant objective without losing command of the immediate task, says Christina MacDougall at Morgan Lewis.

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Are You Happy With Your In-House Role? Take Our Survey

Is your company giving you everything you need to succeed? What are some misconceptions about working in-house? Help Law360 Pulse answer these questions and more in this year's In-House Satisfaction Survey.

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Squire Patton, Baker McKenzie Hit With Data Breach Suits

By Rae Ann Varona

Squire Patton Boggs LLP and Baker McKenzie failed to protect private personal information stored in the law firms' systems from separate cyberattacks and delayed notifying affected individuals for roughly two months, two proposed class actions filed in Ohio and Illinois federal courts have alleged.

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Law360's Legal Lions Of The Week

By Kevin Penton

Susman Godfrey LLP, Langer Grogan & Diver PC, Hausfeld LLP and MoloLamken LLP lead this week's edition of Law360 Legal Lions, after the Ninth Circuit ruled that a former federal judge erred by scrapping a $4.7 billion jury verdict against the National Football League in a class action over the price of its Sunday Ticket broadcast package.

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Judge Kewalramani Warns Against Taking Sanctions Lightly

By Dani Kass

Retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Shashi Kewalramani on Friday cautioned patent attorneys to be extremely discerning when filing sanctions motions, comparing it to crying "fire" in a crowded room.

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Brief

US Legal Sector Jobs Reached Record High In October

By Tracey Read

The legal industry's hot streak continued last month, adding 2,400 more jobs in October to reach a record high, according to seasonally adjusted data released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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US Charges 3 Over $129M AI Scam Using Fake UK Lawyers

By Laura Stewart Liberty

U.S. prosecutors said Thursday they have charged three men, including one facing extradition from London, for allegedly defrauding companies of $129 million through a scheme that used AI to impersonate executives and U.K. lawyers.

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Defeated Texas Justice Being Considered For Federal Bench

By Courtney Bublé

With the clock ticking on Republicans' control of the Senate, President Donald Trump is considering putting a Texas Supreme Court justice who just lost reelection on the federal bench.

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Attys Can Curb AI Error Fallout With Candor, Accountability

By Andrea Keckley

Nearly four years since ChatGPT launched and the legal industry began experimenting at scale with generative artificial intelligence, not a month goes by without another attorney finding a hallucination error in a court filing.

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Top Blanche Adviser Among Latest To Exit DOJ

By Jared Foretek

A top legal adviser to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced his departure from the U.S. Department of Justice Friday, becoming the latest in a slew of high-profile resignations from the department since Republicans' midterm election defeat Tuesday night.

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Ice Miller Sued Over $729K Award After Losing Federal Forum

By Andrea Keckley

A couple who hired Ice Miller LLP to defend their organization against a breach of contract suit have accused the firm in Indiana federal court of exposing them to additional litigation with a settlement that failed to preserve federal jurisdiction over future disputes.

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Law Firm Sues Sierra Leone Over $361K Legal Bill

By Jared Foretek

Law firm Cohen Seglias Pallas Greenhall & Furman PC claims in a complaint filed in D.C. federal court that Sierra Leone's government stiffed it on more than $300,000 in legal fees and costs after the firm defended it against earlier claims of unpaid fees by Jenner & Block.

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Mich. Supreme Court Chief Next To Lead Chief Justice Group

By Melanie Dorsey

The Michigan Supreme Court's chief justice has been named president-elect of the Conference of Chief Justices, a national organization representing the highest-ranking state judicial officers, and she plans to focus on expanding access to legal services, reforming attorney licensing and strengthening courthouse security.

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Roundup

GC Cheat Sheet: The Hottest Corporate News Of The Week

By Michele Gorman

The U.S. Department of Justice's new cash rewards program for tips on criminal fraud could backfire in some cases, experts say. Elsewhere, attorneys are weighing new strategies in the wake of Texas' historic blue shift during the midterm elections. These are some of the stories in corporate legal news you may have missed in the past week.

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In Case You Missed It: Hottest Firms And Stories On Law360

For those who missed out, here's a look back at the law firms, stories and expert analyses that generated the most buzz on Law360 last week.

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