Oakland not giving up in suit against Raiders

An attorney representing the city of Oakland in its recently dismissed suit against the Oakland Raiders NFL team said the case is far from over and will go to trial even after a federal judge said the city failed to show the league's relocation stifled competition.

"I think he's asking for us to give him additional information and we're going to give it to him," New York-based attorney Michael Fay of Berg & Androphy said Friday on behalf of Oakland.

Fay was referring to U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero of the Northern District, who said in a 30-page ruling Thursday, "Any harm Oakland may have suffered as an existing host city from procedures that tend to encourage NFL approval of teams' requests to relocate neither 'flows from that which makes the conduct unlawful' nor 'is of the type the antitrust laws were intended to prevent.'"

Several other issues were raised by Spero, all of which Fay said could be successfully addressed by the city, which can file an amended complaint no later than Sept. 9, according to Spero's ruling.

"The issues he's raised in his order we feel can be addressed in this complaint," Fay said. "There's no reason we won't be going to trial."

Fay said a more thorough interrogation of the league's own bylaws was in order. One of the primary issues, Fay said, was Spero saw the relocation policies of the league as beneficial only to the NFL itself, while his firm saw them as beneficial to cities and the league.

In 2017, the Raiders announced the team would relocate to Las Vegas, bringing a suit from the city alleging it should be paid lost tax revenue and that the NFL violated its own relocation policies when it allowed the Raiders to begin the process of moving to Las Vegas.

"We will be amending. The order is not surprising given what the court said at the hearing," another attorney for the plaintiff, Bruce Simon of Pearson, Simon & Warshaw LLP, said Friday. "We're confident we can meet the court's concerns in our amended complaint."

Spero wrote that damages based on lost taxes, which the city requested, do not constitute commercial interests and instead represent "an element of the state's sovereign rather than commercial interest," and could not be pursued under Clayton Act antitrust claims.

In its original suit, Oakland alleged that the NFL and its teams "act as an anticompetitive cartel extracting significantly greater payments for stadium construction and maintenance from host cities than would be possible in a competitive market." City of Oakland v. Oakland Raiders, 18-CV07444 (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 11, 2018).

In a March motion to dismiss the complaint, the team's attorneys wrote, "Allowing the Raiders to move to a city willing to provide more funding promotes, rather than impairs, competition, and because the restrictions on relocation tended to benefit rather than harm Oakland in its efforts to keep the team from leaving."

Jonathan Gleklen, an attorney who represents the Raiders for Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP declined to comment.