Robins Kaplan

Robins Kaplan is one of the larger and more comprehensive plaintiff shops in the country, with eight US offices in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Silicon Valley, Sioux Falls, Bismarck, Naples and its home base in Minneapolis. “Top-notch all around - strategy, efficiency, legal acumen, overall wise counsel” declares a client. Another client voices, “They are strong litigators, serious lawyers, and deeply knowledgeable about antitrust and class-action litigation,” adding, “They are very skilled, sophisticated and practical. They know the law well and are good in court.”

The Minneapolis headquarters are home to a robust group of trial lawyers. Craig Wildfang is a new addition to the firm's list of star litigators. He is the co-chair of the antitrust and trade regulation group where he frequently represents clients in civil antitrust actions. He and Thomas Undlin, an authority on business disputes, served as co-lead counsel in a multidistrict litigation for a class of over seven million U.S. merchants who accept Visa and Mastercard credit cards and debit cards for the purchase of goods and services. The defendants include Visa and Mastercard, and major card-issuing banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Capital One. In September 2018, the parties reached a $6.26 billion settlement for plaintiffs—the largest known settlement of a private antitrust case in the 120-year history of the Sherman Act. This case concludes more than a decade of litigation over an innovative theory that the organizational structure of Visa and Mastercard, and the voluminous rules they require retailers to follow, are anticompetitive in nature. The preliminary approval of the settlement was granted in January 2019. 

Fellow partner Ronald Schutz has significant trial experience where he has obtained favorable multi-million dollar jury verdicts for numerous clients. He represented celebrity chef Chloe Coscarelli in a suit filed before the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The suit alleges that former business partners ESquared Hospitality and its restaurant group BC Hospitality Group have exploited Coscarelli's name, fame, and image for their own benefit after an arbitration proceeding removed Coscarelli from the restaurant operations in 2017. The suit alleges copyright and trademark infringement, federal unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and violations of California's business and professions code, among other claims. While the California suit was voluntarily dismissed, another lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York, which added several more claims in addition to the claims included in the original complaint.

New York litigator Hollis Salzman, one of Benchmark's Top 250 Women in Litigation, was co-lead counsel in an unprecedented multidistrict litigation where nearly $1.3 billion in settlements was secured for victims of a massive web of anticompetitive conspiracies throughout the auto parts industry. The civil litigation stems from the largest criminal antitrust investigation in U.S. history. It has encompassed 41 separate actions against more than 160 defendants, each involving different auto parts, different anticompetitive agreements, different conspirators and different timelines. The firm represents "end-payor" plaintiffs—consumers and businesses that purchased auto parts, and cars incorporating them, subject to price-fixing agreements. The cumulative settlement figure, which now amounts to almost $1.3 billion, is believed to be the largest indirect purchaser recovery in U.S. history.