Sonya D. Winner

Winner’s eyes widened when she was notified that she would be defending the National Football League in a class action that claimed NFL teams had gotten together to fix the price of cheerleader wages.

“I argued the main case in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on how you plead a complaint to claim a price-fixing conspiracy, which was the basis on which we moved to dismiss it,” she said.

Facts supporting the existence of a conspiracy, such as a potential meeting in which owners conspired to fix wages, were missing in addition to lacking evidence that teams were paying the same wages, according to the Covington attorney.

Winner obtained two successive orders holding that the complaint failed to satisfy the legal standard for pleading an antitrust conspiracy claim. The case is now on appeal to the 9th Circuit. Kelsey v. NFL Enterprises LLC et al., 3:17-cv00496 (N.D. Cal., filed July 26, 2017).

“They had nothing,” Winner said. “I knew since I read the complaint that it could be attacked on this ground.”

Winner typically gets cases in the sports and financial services industries that concern “strange, one-off issues.” She employs an aggressive strategy, often sitting on her leverage until class certification is decided.

“If it’s denied, then all you’ve got is the name plaintiff claim for not very much money,” Winner said. “The leverage tends to swing the other way.”

The veteran complex civil litigation attorney has also been working extensively with the Family Violence Appellate Project, an organization developing published law on domestic violence issues to provide more guidance to lower courts.

“Courts don’t always adhere to protections by the legislation given to victims,” she said. “It’s more a matter of step-by-step process and building the blocks to get a body of case law that guides family court.”

— Winston Cho