Hartley LLP

As Jason S. Hartley sees it, he and his four colleagues at his eponymous law firm are all-American lawyers.

The firm only represents plaintiffs and only on contingency fees. But they do not handle personal injury or mass tort cases. They bring antitrust class-action cases accusing business of price-fixing and other anticompetitive wrongs.

“What we’re doing is protecting capitalism,” Hartley said. “We’re helping to strengthen our economy.”

Although his small firm is only about three years old, it has won court appointments as co-lead counsel in several large antitrust matters around the country.

Among those is a class action against the nation’s largest beef processors, Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill Inc., JBS SA and National Beef Packing Co. over an alleged scheme to boost the price of processed beef. Together, the four defendant companies process 85 percent of the cattle raised in the U.S. The case implicates billions of dollars of commerce, he said. In re: DPP Beef Antitrust Litigation, 20-cv-01319 (D. Min., filed June 6, 2020)

Another billion-dollar case accuses California’s largest gasoline refiners of coordinating substantial price increases at various times across nearly a decade. Hartley said his firm is de facto co-lead counsel with Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP representing gas station owners. Robinson v. BP Petroleum Products Inc., 15-cv-01749 (S.D. CA, filed Aug. 6, 2015)

The firm is going up against giant chemical companies BASF SE, Dow Chemical Co., DuPont de Nemours Inc. and others for allegedly manipulating the prices of two chemicals used to make polyurethane. In re Diisocyanates Antitrust Litigation, 2:18-mc-01001 (W.D. PA, filed Oct. 18, 2018)

“These defendants are recidivist price-fixers. I’ve sued them many, many times … for price-fixing all sorts of different chemicals,” Hartley said.

Hartley has been pursuing commercial class actions on contingency since he joined Ross, Dixon & Bell LLP in 1999. His now partner Jason M. Linder joined him a couple of years later. After Ross Dixon merged into Troutman Sanders LLP in 2008, they stayed another year before opening a San Diego office of Missouri’s Stueve Siegel Hanson LLP. They launched Hartley LLP in 2018.

Linder said he feels like “one of the good guys” because of the firm’s practice. “Without the kind of work we do, people throughout the United States would have no chance to right the kind of wrongs we litigate — whether it be widespread antitrust violations, pervasive employment issues, or even an individual company that simply doesn’t have the resources to face off against a large corporation without a contingency arrangement,” he said in an email.

Hartley said he enjoys commercial class actions because he must become an expert in every industry he goes after. “It’s the perfect kind of practice for a curious mind,” he said. He has learned about DSL technology, credit card technology, chemicals, sausage casings and more. “You learn about industries you didn’t even know existed, so it’s super fun.”

Now, he is beginning to branch out from class actions into representing businesses as plaintiffs in commercial litigation but on contingency. “I don’t think a lot of lawyers are doing that, frankly,” he said.

In one such case, the firm is suing a company that refuses to supply a smaller company with needless injectors — which the smaller company invented — apparently because it intends to offer them to transsexuals for at-home testosterone-replacement therapy. BLS Pharma Inc. v. Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc., 30-2019-01119045 (O.C. Super. Ct., filed Dec. 18, 2019)

Hartley said he does not plan for his firm to grow too much. “It’s a quality-of-life firm,” he said. “We come in fresh every day because we got a good night’s rest.”

— Don DeBenedictis