Joseph R. Saveri

Early in January, the Justice Department’s antitrust division indicted Surgical Care Affiliates LLC for maintaining yearslong agreements with rival healthcare companies to not recruit one another’s senior-level employees. Barely two months later, Saveri and his firm filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company that named names the government’s indictment omitted.

That’s because his firm investigated the matter to determine who participants such as Company One and Executive A were. “We were the first to actually name them, before the government did,” he said. Spradling v. Surgical Care Affiliates LLC, 21-cv-01324 (N.D. Ill., filed March 9, 2021).

Saveri says his firm’s ability to ferret out and scrutinize potential cases is something that distinguishes it from many other antitrust plaintiffs’ firms.

During the pandemic, the firm roughly doubled in size to about 20 lawyers, including a new office in New York City and a senior-level attorney based in Seattle. But it also invested in its investigative staff, which includes an economist and experienced paralegals.

Saveri expects to go back into trial at the end of November on a very large case the firm investigated and pursued before others. It accuses manufacturers of price-fixing in the multibillion-dollar, international market for capacitors. In Re Capacitors Antitrust Litigation, 3:17-md-02801-JD (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 5, 2017).

“We filed the first civil case in the country, and we identified a number of the defendants before they were named as criminal defendants by the Department of Justice,” he said. Of the 22 original defendants, 20 have accepted settlements totaling $439.55 million.

Saveri is the sole lead counsel for the direct-purchasers class in the capacitors case, and he and his firm have been appointed to leadership positions in many of his other cases.

This past May, the firm became co-lead counsel for antitrust plaintiffs in litigation against Robinhood Markets Inc., hedge funds and investment firms on behalf of investors hurt by the stock market frenzy over GameStop Corp. January 2021 Short Squeeze Trading Litigation, 1:21-md-02989 (S.D. Fla., filed 4/1/2021).

Beyond antitrust, Saveri expected to have final approval soon of a $52 million settlement from Facebook Inc. for content moderators who suffered psychological injuries from repeatedly examining disturbing material to delete from the social media site. Scola v. Facebook Inc., 18CIV05135 (S.M. Super. Ct., filed Sept. 21, 2018).

“That isn’t an antitrust case, but it is really the first of its kind on behalf of these content moderators,” he said.

- Don DeBenedictis