Photo of Christopher E. Ondeck

Chris Ondeck is co-chair of the Firm’s Antitrust Group and co-head of the Washington DC office. He represents clients in complex antitrust and consumer protection litigation, defends mergers and acquisitions before the U.S. antitrust agencies, represents companies involved in government investigations, and counsels on antitrust compliance. Chris is also the founder and leader of the firm’s Price Gouging Practice, and is one of the key thought leaders in this space.

Chris handles antitrust matters for clients in a number of industries, including food and agriculture, financial services, media, telecom, technology, e-commerce, consumer products, natural resources, oil and gas, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals.  He also serves as outside counsel to a large number of industry groups, including trade associations and cooperatives.

Chris has been recognized as a leading antitrust practitioner by Chambers, noting that clients describe him as "our primary thought partner - he's very good at explaining the complex issues and making them easy to understand" and praising "his strong advocacy skills"; by The National Law Review as a “Go To Thought Leader 2020”; by Acritas as a “Star” in multiple years; by Benchmark Litigation as a National Litigation Star 2021; and by The Legal 500 United States for Antitrust: Civil Litigation/Class Actions.

 As this year’s roundtable of enforcers demonstrated, big business is probably antitrust enforcers’ greatest fear. Spring in Washington means Cherry blossoms and antitrust. And last week, 3,700 antitrust lawyers and government officials from around the globe descended on Washington to visit the Cherry blossoms and discuss how they need more government intervention to make the economy work for everybody and need to bring ever more “plausible” cases in order to nudge and push the courts along.

Antitrust claims in a class action case filed against Amazon in U.S. Federal District Court will largely proceed, after the Court allowed most of the consumers’ pricing claims to survive a motion for summary judgment.  The Court dismissed a Sherman Act claim, but allowed most other claims to proceed.  Of particular note, Amazon’s “most favored nation” (MFN) policy will continue to be under scrutiny, despite the fact that courts typically do not find MFNs to be anticompetitive.  It is widely recognized that MFNs, in fact, often serve procompetitive purposes.

One of the bellwether price gouging cases from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic was recently reversed and remanded by New York’s First Judicial Department of the Appellate Division.  

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced in May 2020 that her office had filed a lawsuit against a wholesale grocery distributor – Quality King Distributors – and its CEO for price gouging. The lawsuit alleged that between January 2020 and April 2020, Quality King raised the price of Lysol when its costs had not increased, “dramatically boost[ing] its gross profit margins for Lysol Spray, almost quintupling them over its pre-crisis margins.” Quality King sold 46,104 cans of Lysol during the time in question, and “each time one of these [] cans of Lysol was sold at retail for an inflated price – and each time a person bought any other Lysol product whose price Quality King had inflated – Quality King’s price-gouging caused injury to a consumer,” the lawsuit stated. The Attorney General seeks, among other relief, disgorgement of all profits from the illegal practice and a civil penalty of $25,000.

The answer? Not much, in itself. If one patent is good, 132 is probably fine too. That was Judge Easterbrook’s reasoning in a recent decision addressing indirect purchasers’ antitrust challenge to AbbVie’s so-called “patent thicket” of 132 patents around the blockbuster drug Humira, arguing the sheer number of patents blocked

On July 11, 2022, the United States District Court for the District of Kansas approved a $264 million settlement against Mylan and certain of its subsidiaries in the case In Re EpiPen (Epinephrine Injection, USP) Marketing, Sales Practices, and Antitrust Litigation in a matter broadly tagged as price-gouging litigation. Plaintiffs filed class action lawsuits against Mylan, the owner of EpiPen, and Pfizer, Inc., a manufacturer and seller of EpiPen, alleging, “anticompetitive conduct including, among other things: engaging in a ‘hard switch’ and selling EpiPens only in packs of two; entering into discount agreements with schools that were conditioned on the schools not purchasing competing products; securing multiple overlapping patents on minor changes to the EpiPen and engaging in ‘sham’ patent litigation to forestall generic competition; and paying excessive rebates to commercial insurance companies, pharmaceutical benefits managers, and state-based Medicaid agencies conditioned on those companies and agencies not reimbursing the use of competing products.” The plaintiffs claimed that the defendants broke various state antitrust laws and the federal civil RICO statute. The suits, filed in the Northern District of Illinois, the District of Kansas, the District of New Jersey, and the Western District of Washington, were joined in August of 2017 in the District of Kansas.

Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and California have taken recent steps to further protect the infant formula market from price gouging. On June 7, 2022, the D.C. Council passed the “Infant Formula Consumer Protection Emergency Act.” The Act, which will remain in effect for 90 days, targets companies selling baby formula at extremely high prices. The Act provides that companies may be subject to a $5,000 fine, for first-time offenses, or a $10,000 fine, for subsequent offenses, if they sell infant formula at a price greater than 20% of what they previously sold substantially similar formula in the District over the 90-day period prior to February 17, 2022. If the retailer never sold a substantially similar formula product in that 90-day period, they would face fines if they sell infant formula at a price greater than 20% of the average price of substantially similar infant formula product from substantially similar retailers.

On May 24, 2022, the FTC announced a widespread inquiry into the ongoing infant formula shortage. The agency had been tasked by the White House with investigating any price gouging or unfair market practices in the industry. The agency is seeking public comments on “various factors that may have contributed to the infant formula shortage…as well as its impact on families and retailers.”