(Daily Journal) Joseph Saveri of the Joseph Saveri Law Firm was selected to the California Daily Journal’s Top 100 Lawyers in California, an award he also won in 2016. A news profile of him appeared today in a Supplement to the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal:
As an antitrust crusader, with 30 years of civil litigation experience, Saveri considers it a privilege to be able to hold large companies accountable for violations in reverse payment pharmaceutical, vertical distribution, global price-fixing cartel, and a variety of Section 2 monopolization cases.
“The government, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission have an important role but have limited resources and I think the private litigation system has always had a really important contribution to the antitrust law,” Saveri said. After building up the antitrust department at Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein LLP, Saveri left to start his own firm, the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, in 2012 where he flourished as a top antitrust and complex civil and class action litigator in state, federal, and international arenas.
Saveri currently serves as co-lead counsel in a reverse payment case against Bayer AG and several generic drug companies in which Plaintiffs allege an unlawful agreement was made between Bayer and the companies to keep generic versions of the antibiotic drug Cipro out of the market, allowing Bayer to charge inflated prices. After the California Supreme Court ruled in the Plaintiffs’ favor, adopting a “structured” rule of reason as the standard for adjudicating reverse payment antitrust claims, Plaintiffs ultimately reached settlements totaling $399 million on the eve of trial. In re Cipro Cases I and II, 4154 and 4220 (San Diego Super. Ct., filed Aug. 5, 2002).
According to Saveri, we would all live in a country with worse products and less economic opportunities, if not for antitrust law. He said ordinary people can easily understand and respond to moral and economic issues central to the law.
“The antitrust law is interesting because on some level it is very technical and driven by complex economics but at the same time is easily explainable and important to non-experts,” Saveri said. “I can explain to my relatives at Thanksgiving about what’s wrong about a drug company paying another to stay out of the market.”
(Reporting by Blaise Scemama)