Marc M. Seltzer

A veteran litigator, Seltzer heads Susman Godfrey's Los Angeles office and is a member of the firm's executive committee. Last year the American Jewish Committee gave him its Judge Learned Hand Award for his professional and community activities. He's on the board of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and is a past president of that group, and he's on the boards of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the American Constitution Society.

He is lead counsel on an array of major antitrust cases. In the long-running multidistrict litigation over claims of price-fixing in the sale of automotive parts, the firm serves as co-lead for a class of consumer and business plaintiffs; the team has defeated multiple motions to dismiss.

A hearing on a fourth round of settlements was set for mid-June in Detroit. "We're looking at $184 million in this round," Seltzer said. "We are still trying to resolve the case with the remaining defendants." So far the plaintiffs have recovered more than $1.2 billion. In re: Automotive Parts Antitrust Litigation, 12-md-02311 (E.D. Mich., filed Feb. 7, 2012).

In a case at the intersection of antitrust and patent law, Seltzer is the most senior member of Susman Godfrey's plaintiffs' team advancing claims that Qualcomm abused its monopoly power in the modern chipset market to extract supracompetitive licensing fees on its intellectual property. The team won class certification from U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh of San Jose in 2018; Seltzer argued the case against the defendant's appeal before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in December 2019. The panel has since asked for briefing on whether to defer its decision while it decides a parallel Federal Trade Commission matter. Damages in the case are estimated to top $5 billion. In re: Qualcomm Antitrust Litigation, 5:17-md-02773 (N.D. Cal., filed April 6, 2017).

He represents a potential class of several thousand truck drivers suing over alleged anticompetitive "no-poaching" agreements among trucking companies. Markson v. CRST International Inc., 5:17-cv-01261 (C.D. Cal., filed June 22, 2017).

Earlier in 2019 Seltzer and colleagues filed an antitrust class action in federal court in Chicago against the four largest realtor companies and the National Association of Realtors alleging antitrust violations based on rules and practices that require the seller's broker to offer to pay the buyer-broker's commission. Moehri v. The National Association of Realtors, 1:19-cv-01610 (N.D. Ill., filed March 6, 2019).

"Our basic claim is that the rules effectively require sellers to pay more in commissions," Seltzer said. "The defendants have filed a motion to dismiss, and we are awaiting a decision on that."

-- John Roemer