Anita F. Stork

Stork is co-chair of Covington & Burlington's antitrust litigation practice group and a former chair of the litigation group.

For client Philippine Airlines Inc., she settled on favorable terms a class action by passengers accusing the carriers of fixing the prices of tickets on trans-Pacific flights. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco narrowed the case for Stork's client, ruling that certain fares to the Philippines and Japan are exempt from antitrust claims under federal law, which requires airlines to file certain international fares with the U.S. Department of Transportation. In re: Transpacific Passenger Air Transportation Antitrust Litigation, 08-mdl-1913 (N.D. Cal., filed Nov. 6, 2007).

"It was a good settlement for the client," she said, one that was structured so that payment ended at the end of 2019. "That turned out to be advantageous because we are now in a time of unprecedented crisis for airlines." That became clear to Stork when she attended a March 4, 2020, hearing in Chicago on another matter. "I never saw O'Hare that vacant. It was a comparative ghost town. I thought of my Philippine Airline client, and I realized it was good timing for them to get out of our case before disaster struck."

Now she and her colleagues are like many working remotely. "We've quickly moved to the world of WebEx and Zoom, and teleconferences have certainly not gone away," Stork said. "We're researching how best to do depositions remotely. In the antitrust world, depos raise issues where you have a high level of confidentiality expressed in protective orders. We have to figure out how to make sure that company executives or whoever is observing the depo and is excluded by the protective order actually leaves the room when required and that the leaving is made clear on the record."

Stork led a Covington team that achieved dismissal of all claims against the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education after a would-be medical student sued the University of Washington and the ACGME for allegedly conspiring to wrongfully deny him a fellowship in pediatric heart surgery. The court granted Stork's client's first motion to dismiss, noting that the plaintiff did not allege antitrust injury and did not adequately allege that consumer welfare had been harmed. Conklin v University of Washington Medicine, 2:18-cv-00090 (W.D. Wash., filed Jan. 22, 2018)

"We made the interesting argument in our dismissal motion that our client was a nonprofit that was not a competitor with anyone, so there could be no collusion," Stork said. "There was simply no price issue involved. The dismissal took about a year. In the antitrust world, that's relatively quick. We ended with a very happy client."

-- John Roemer